BRUSSELS.- Specializing in contemporary design and ceramics, Pierre Marie Giraud is starting a series of chromatic exhibits in three parts: “White” in September, “Black” in October, and “Color” in December.

From September 12 to October 3, he will devote his space to “White,” a source of inspiration for Alain Vernis, Kristin McKirdy, and Martine Bedin. Synonymous with purity, the ideal, and timelessness, white—which is less neutral than it appears—is the gateway to an infinitely rich world expressed in different ways by the works of these three artists.

Kristin McKirdy: White as inwardness
Kristin McKirdy plays with the contrast between materials and colors to reveal the powerful volumes of her sculptures with their pure lines. Protected by a coarse, somber shell, the smooth and white enameled portion symbolizes the inwardness of her work, like a mirror of her own introspection. By grasping the unfathomable nature of White, she makes her works both luminous and gentle. Kristin McKirdy thus suggests the vulnerability and panache of the artist as she bares herself.

Alain Vernis: White as spirituality
As the progeny of a meditation nourished by the observation of nature, the art of Alain Vernis (born in 1946 in Sens) is made of silence in order to attain the essence… what the use of white reveals, devoid of sophistication. Neither turned nor “wad fashioned,” his bowls are not guided by an esthetically-driven approach: they are the result of a state of internal void, allowing the material to speak for itself.

Fashioning clay requires Alain Vernis to engage in “a slow and arduous preparation to achieve the outcome, to assume a state close to that of a trance, and ultimately achieve equilibrium between body and spirit. That is the price to pay in order for the object to be pure of all that is not itself. (…) The clay becomes the skin, the very flesh of this bowl of indescribable shape. The bowl incarnates both the world of nature and the spiritual world,” comments critic Elisabeth Védrenne.

Martine Bedin: White as structure
Martine Bedin, an architect born in Bordeaux in 1957, turns her interest to the construction of shapes and objects. For instance, she stacks “one element on another, one brick atop the other, all strictly white, as if the decorative function were taking place on another level,” describes designer Michele De Lucchi. With her predilection for marble, Martine Bedin arranges cubes to create vases whose deep white magnifies the proportions, and disproportions. Here, instead of the pattern creating the décor, the structure does. She was a founding member of the “Memphis” design group, alongside Ettore Sottsass.

Depending on its striking shades of varying degrees and the materials, some more or less shiny, White surprises us through the verticality of what it expresses, a far cry from void and naught. From one artist to the next, it remains an ideal to strive toward.