PARIS.- Lutum is an exhibition conceived in two voices, bringing together the worlds of Alexander Rączka and Javier Carro Temboury. Its title, from the Latin lutum, meaning “mud,” recalls that the ancient name of Paris, Lutetia, also finds its origin in this raw material. Mud, both fertile and unstable, here becomes a shared metaphor: that of a common ground, a soil where history, memory, and fictions intertwine.

Just a hundred meters away flows the Seine. Its successive floods and the erosion of its banks bring to light buried artifacts, gradually exhumed by the silt. When the waters recede, they drag along trunks, shopping carts, and washing machines, leaving behind the remnants of a submerged past. Alexander Rączka’s practice unfolds transversally, integrating within painting a diversity of media that expand its expressive possibilities. Some of his series arise from urban research, where the artist collects iconographic forms already present in public space while observing those that emerge more fleetingly. The city appears as a living swamp: submerged relics mingle with contemporary ruins, a continuous sedimentation is at work, weaving a spatio-temporal network of exchanges between places, objects, and individuals. Mud thus becomes a space of memory, where the city’s affects as much as its symptoms are revealed.

On this same riverbank, Javier Carro Temboury summons another archaic image: that of a human who, almost intuitively, might have shaped clayey mud for the first time without really thinking about it, leaving it forgotten by the fire, only to find it hardened. Accidental gesture, founding gesture: once fired, mud becomes irreversible.

Javier Carro Temboury collects and repurposes found objects, particularly fragments of ceramics, to reveal their historical and symbolic charge. These materials, bearers of everyday uses or forgotten memories, become the starting point for assemblages that place tradition and innovation in tension. From funerary urns to construction bricks, from water pipes to spacecraft, humanity has prolonged its own existence through this transformed matter—both tool and memory of its civilization.

Thus, mud connects us. In the contemporary silt as in the archaic hearth, it preserves and invents, it buries and reveals. It offers us fragments of ourselves—those affects we weave with objects, images, ruins, and flows—while opening up a shared narrative where the city, its ailments and its potential, and the very origin of civilization converge.

Lutum questions this passage between the sediments of the present and the earliest gestures, between what fades away and what endures. It invites us to think of mud not as a residue but as a matrix: a space of revelation, resurgence, and reinvention.

Javier Carro Temboury (Madrid, 1997) explores sculpture through a process-based practice. Using found objects, particularly ceramics, he investigates the social reception of technology and its various local developments.

Since 2025, he has been based in Paris, where he maintains strong ties after graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. In 2022, after receiving the jury’s commendation, he was awarded the ASA residency at the Akademie der Bildende Künste in Vienna. That same year, he received the Joseph Ebstein Sculpture Prize (Fondation de France) and the “Félicité des Félicités” Prize (Fondation des Amis des Beaux- Arts). Additionally, one of his sculptures was acquired for the collection of the École des Beaux- Arts in Paris.

His exhibition cycle, Café Transversal, merges social interaction with sculpture in a series of site- specific performances, each uniquely designed for its location. The project has recently been commissioned by the Centro de Arte de Alcobendas in Madrid, the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain MAMC+ in Saint-Étienne, Pech in Vienna, the Palais d’Iéna in Paris, and Villa Belleville in Paris. It will soon be the focus of a permanent commission for a residential building in Montreuil, France.

Alexander Rączka was born in 1995 in Strasbourg (France). The transversal character of Rączka’s practice allows him to employ several mediums within the painting itself, which has broadened his spectrum of communication. Some series are the result of previous research that required fieldwork in the city to identify existent but also new forms of iconographic systems. Alexander Rączka’s work also takes the form of books and objects of limited edition, each one of them, by its format and its subjects, focuses on subjects of archive or history to which drawings are confronted.

He participated in various exhibitions in France (La Morsure des Termites, Palais de Tokyo, Paris/Au nom du nom, Rencontres de la photographie, Arles) as well as internationally (NY art book fair 2018, New York). Alexander Rączka is the co-founder of the artist-run space Volonté 93. In the form of a multidisciplinary artists’ collective as well as a place of creation, residency and independently curated place installed in Saint-Ouen-sur Seine since 2017, this association allows young artists from various backgrounds to practice in workshops made available.

A platform between alternative and institutional scene, La Volonté 93 is also surrounded and supported by a network of cultural and educational actors in France (Palais de Tokyo, ENSBA, Ecole Kourtrajmé, associations and curators...) thus participating in a heterogeneous and transversal, intercultural and intergenerational network.