The feast of ceramic flesh by the French artist duo Bachelot & Caron opens on 31 January at the BPS22 Museum of the Province of Hainaut in Charleroi. A wonderful museum with brilliant curators, housed in a former industrial building, complete with a café-restaurant offering regional products and chef-driven cuisine. Capital city museums could envy the projects at BPS22. I have never been disappointed by making the journey “from the Varangians to the Greeks,” from Flanders to Wallonia, to attend an exhibition opening. In this case, it was absolutely spectacular. Over the past ten years, ceramics have migrated from applied arts into the realm of “art.” What Louis Bachelot and Marjolaine Caron are creating in ceramics is also conceptual art. This is one of those exhibitions where, to truly understand Porcelain and the Chronicle of Events, you need to delve into the artists’ biographies, like a password to unlock a treasure chest of wonders.

Louis Bachelot (Algiers, 1960) and Marjolaine Caron (Paris, 1963) initially worked, respectively, as a set designer and costume designer for theatre, cinema, and opera, before turning to illustration for the press. For twenty years, they collaborated with the magazine Le Nouveau Détective (a publication on real crimes, founded in 1928 by the Kessel brothers to expose social injustices affecting the working class), developing a unique “chronicle of events” aesthetic that combined photostaging, digital retouching, and painterly effects. The pair created images using collage, assemblage, and painterly enhancements, employing one of the first digital retouching programs, Photoshop. Their home studio often served as the setting for their photographs, transformed into a shooting space where children, relatives, and neighbours were invited to pose, while they themselves enacted scenes in deliberately exaggerated situations with frozen gestures. These stories of real crimes were never presented as objective facts. They were dramatized, theatrically staged, turning into visual parables where horror, burlesque, and a kind of dark humour intertwined.

And all of this experience and media practice suddenly burst into the serene world of ceramics, with its domestic objects, little pots, and vases. The artists left these familiar forms intact, yet gave them Baroque shapes, populating them with such macabre creatures that the effect is breathtaking. True crime rendered in Baroque aesthetics, infused with dark humour.

Imagine the BPS22 hall, bathed in a bluish twilight. A long banquet table seems to testify to a celebration abruptly interrupted. A boar sprawls brazenly across a gigantic table in the style of The Last Supper, seemingly gutted in life and carved into medallions. Pastries, poultry and game, wine bottles, fruit-filled vases, and wilting bouquets are scattered everywhere, like a frozen orgy—glazed flesh, monstrous reliefs, exaggerated appetites, whose domestic grotesqueness emphasises the emptiness and pettiness of consumer desires. The material seems to want to return to life, ready to reenact the farce of an impossible feast.

In contrast, a wall adorned with more than seventy photographic compositions offers a very different abundance—news stories in which violence never appears overtly but emerges in incongruous details, absurd presences, and an atmosphere too well-lit to be innocent; in a flawless setting, anxiety surfaces, a frozen gesture demanding that the story see the light.

A dialogue of excess unfolds between them. A body wrapped in plastic is dragged and hidden inside a cylindrical scene reminiscent of a boxing ring. When the perpetrators reappear, they transform into ceramics, ready to be sold to the highest bidder—or even given away for free. The performance embodies a metaphor of the body and the creative act, tracing the genesis of Louis Bachelot and Marjolaine Caron’s work, from meticulous illustration of news stories to the sensual materiality of their ceramics. The project explores the ambivalence of artistic creation undertaken as a pair, the erotic-animal nature of encounters with others and with matter, the intimate experience of the duo, and the wear of bodies that display themselves, embrace, and struggle to survive in an increasingly complex world. Unlike this staging, which combines fundamental myths and revival, the ceramic banquet offers a tangible embodiment of this transformation. Each fragment, glazed flesh, and grotesque form becomes a symbol of the chaotic, almost Baroque expression of the creative impulse. In contrast, the wall of photographic compositions archives fragments of reality—news stories frozen in time as myths. The viewer is shocked, intrigued, captivated. By the secret magic of the horrific and, at the same time, the beautiful.

By merging “news articles” and “porcelain,” Bachelot and Caron create tension: crime—or at least its fictionalised form—leaves the newspaper, the painting, and becomes a durable object inviting the viewer to enter the atmosphere of a crime scene, not as a detached voyeur, but as a participant in an ambiguous ritual. This shift recalls Bourdieu’s idea that the “news article” functions as a distraction—it attracts, enchants, unsettles, and diverts attention from the true mechanisms of violence, power, and society. Bachelot and Caron do not offer explicit condemnation but rather a theatre of violence, a catharsis through art, a distorted mirror in which the banal, the everyday, and the taboo become visible—but in the form of visual and sculptural parables.

We deliberately led you into the main exhibition hall, which contains the essence of the show. Yet in the museum, the tour begins with the first hall. In homage to two iconic figures of Belgian painting, René Magritte and Chantal Akerman, it is presented as a mise-en-scène, echoing one of the surrealist’s most enigmatic works, even in its oxymoronic title, L’Assassin menacé (The Threatened Assassin). Each painted object finds its counterpart in glazed ceramics at the crime scene, where truth and falsehood intertwine, along with subtle references to elements from Akerman’s cult film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. While both works share an interest in bourgeois interiors as sites of psychological tension and in banality as a source of drama, here they function as a distorted mirror.

The second mise-en-scène, devoted to the French artist and ceramist Jean Lursat and the Omar Raddad case, similarly relies on hints, doubts, and montage between reality and fiction. Bachelot and Caron unite two artistic worlds—the paradisal landscapes of Lursat, his symbolic iconography touching on cosmogonic themes, and his depictions of man’s destruction of man, including the phrase “Omar m’a tuer,” which became famous in connection with this legal case and inspired numerous parodies (the high-profile 1991 French murder trial of Ghislaine Marchal, in which gardener Omar Raddad was convicted partly due to a bloody inscription with a grammatical error, later becoming emblematic of possible judicial error and debates over his guilt).

Finally, the third mise-en-scène is devoted to Édouard Manet’s famous painting Olympia, which at the time of its presentation in 1865 was considered the most scandalous nude figure ever painted. Although the subject is quite classical, tracing back to the Italian Renaissance, the model for the painting was Victorine Meurent, herself an artist who, from the early twentieth century, became the heroine of several novels and numerous works dedicated to freedom, marginality, and transgression. She is also a central figure in the detective opera Victorine, written by the conceptual art movement Art and Language. Using this symbolic image, Bachelot and Caron remind us that artistic nudity—the female nude, an object of the gaze, historically celebrated—also embodies sites of power, alienation, exploitation, and fetishisation. The artists exploit this duality, as many of their photographic works depict a culture of femicide, present and active across creative fields. Softened by euphemisms, filtered through propriety, made acceptable by beauty or utility, crimes against women acquire social value when embedded in art.

Louis Bachelot was delighted when I remarked that one of the figures in the “Boxing” mise-en-scène resembled Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko. He recalled how many times he had been world champion (three) and all his boxing achievements. Although the photo was taken at random, the identity of the head of a defending country (who, incidentally, has never been knocked out despite many knockout victories of his own) resonates with the idea of the boxing project. Boxing appears before us as a theatre, intertwining animal nature and control, a confined space activating the most archaic instincts—to strike, dodge, survive—while simultaneously channeling them into strict boundaries, civilising the wildness. On the ring, everything begins as courtship, a ritual preceding confrontation. Ernest Hemingway, John Keats, Jack Joyce, Carol Oates, Francis Picabia, Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille frequented boxing gyms, fascinated by the mechanics of movement, the beauty of the blow, the vulnerability of bodies, the metaphor for life’s challenges and courage. Louis Bachelot and Marjolaine Caron join these writers in a shared pursuit—to explore human truth through the tense body, in a space resembling the ring: a place of struggle, beauty, intensity, and turmoil.