“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light enters” Leonard Cohen sang.

This is what Fanny Alloing’s work illustrates. First, molded prints: face, bust. Then, her creations became larger, with body prints, made on nude models, often dancers – she is a former dancer. Split, cracked, they appear frail, fragile like molt skins: she calls them “chrysalis”.

Her artistic work is recent: “I started to present my clay molds in 2014” she explains. I used to stage molts of plaster. The imprint, as close as possible to the being that laid down, and the exit of the model of its chrysalis: this is the essence of my work”. For five years, the plaster has become a matrix, she manipulates the clay in thin layers inside, resulting in thick works of two centimeters, “thin as autumn leaves”. Each step has a symbolic value. First, the process: “Molding is a two-person experience and when people come out of the mold, it’s like a rebirth.” The materials, then: “The plaster nudes are ghostly, like an insect molt, when I stamp the clay inside the plasters, I find the density of the flesh”. Then comes the transport of the dry clay print for cooking, with the possibility of its destruction, the extreme delicacy of the molding can cause the loss. Approach and object speak of the body, of the experience of the body as knowledge of finitude and intuition of its mortality. Here is the foundation of this tragic sense of human destiny, embodied in a fleshly envelope where grace and fragility intermingle.

From the appearance of mummies wrapped in plaster strips of her beginnings, the human “chrysalis” of Fanny Alloing have reached, by the passage to terracotta, an additional force of evocation. The crude of the material that cracks, mingles with the sophistication of the enameling effects and the subtlety of the rendering of the bodies. There is acute empathy for man, who speaks of the bond, the vulnerability, and the dignity. This “fight to keep the being”, of which the ceramist speaks about the process of creation, acquires its second, deeper, metaphysical meaning.

Mikaël Faujour / La revue de la ceramique et du verre

“Fanny Alloing and the Women of Fire”

From her immaculate plaster chrysalis – “molt of the soul” as she likes to say – Fanny Alloing gives birth to her women of fire. An artist with heart and soul, she opens the way to secret journeys beyond time.

Neither past nor future but each work is anchored in a fragile present. Her women of fire bear the mark of a power coming from elsewhere which is in no way opposed to the delicate breaks, splinters, holes, and parchments of the rough traces of life engraved forever.

Text by Anne Luthi-Dumont – art collector

“Dialogue” exhibition between ancient and contemporary ceramics organized by Lucien Ruimy, FIAA’s founder, who brings together a choice of works from the Malicorne-sur-Sarthe Ceramics Museum and creations made by seven contemporary ceramists.

“If the body made of living flesh is the first measure of the world, Fanny Alloing colors it, inhabits it. Even if she tears it into pieces, she refuses its destruction as much as its simple replica.

Eroticism explodes in various “ardore” but pain and death are not absent as images of the condition of the existence on earth and by the clay annealed in such work. Nudity points outside of its sole kind. However, this work – paradoxically – brings us closer to her. As if Fanny Alloing synthesized a set of energies to express the unspeakable, the indescribable.

It offers enigmatic rebirths in a poetic apparition of what, until then, was not perceived in the same way in a work that recalls the burned bodies of Pompeii as the most relevant experiments of postmodernity. »

Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret – Art Critic and Writer

FIAA website page dedicated to the “Ceramics” exhibition

Birth of a new piece.

Exhibition tribute to Jean Zabukovec. 20 contemporary sculptors are invited by Jean-Yves Gosti to present their work.

Fanny Alloing’s work: ceramic sculptures, simple faces, or including body parts… A precise, meticulous production, where we feel how much the artist gives to the sculpture with her hands and soul. These works have such a presence that they seem to radiate the aura of their soul. The emotion creates itself when you are face to face with one of these expressive visages. Dialogue of humanities, clay, and flesh… According to certain ancestral legends, it is from clay that men were modeled. How to remain unmoved in front of the heat of the earth animated by these textures and burns? Because the artist mixes earth and fire.

Hélène Raynal – art collector