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Cécile Raynal
Char by Cécile Raynal - Animal smoke-fired stoneware sculpture, fable, clay

2025

$9,813.76
£7,306.25
€8,280
CA$13,521.86
A$15,056.58
CHF 7,962.27
MX$183,229.34
NOK 100,366.19
SEK 94,559.70
DKK 63,031.74

About the Item

Char is a unique smoke-fired stoneware, resin, plaster and clay sculpture by French contemporary artist Cécile Raynal, dimensions are 84 × 28 × 48 cm (33 × 11 × 18.9 in). This sculpture is unique and comes with an authenticity certificate. This piece depicts a char, a fish from the Salvelinus family. The fish appears to leap from the ground, as if emerging from a river. Its energy and vitality are conveyed both through its posture and the surface treatment, which reveals the artist’s gestures and creates subtle plays of light. This piece is part of the sculptural installation Chœur de bêtes (Choir of Beasts), which brings together eleven similarly sized animals arranged around a cephalophorous figure. These creatures, stepping outside natural proportions and often frozen in uncanny postures, heighten the scene’s mysterious atmosphere. The artist describes the work as follows: "Hybrid beasts and creatures, peoples, mass-culture: wolf, hare, fox, raccoon, goat, donkey, crow, feline, badger, world-tree, birder. So many motifs, subjects, metaphorical presences. […] They embody other spirits, other imaginations, other ways of seeing, moving, and being moved. The peoples of the beasts suffer us, deplore us—since always and everywhere, we fabulate them. They represent us, they duplicate us. […] So I model great silences between man and beast, envisaging possible alliances. The future is only possible in an alliance, a common field, an earthy and spiritual heart." Chœur de bêtes, a long-term project developed over several years, was featured in Cécile Raynal’s solo exhibition À la table des Dames (At the Ladies’ Table), held at the historic Montivilliers Abbey in Normandy in 2025. This former home to nuns and abbesses provided the perfect backdrop for a body of work that merges feminine portraiture with animal figures. Raynal’s sculptures resist ornamentation or ease. They are raw, sometimes unsettling, visibly shaped through struggle and matter. Yet they rise upright—alive, defiant. Her pieces evoke a world where the animal, the feminine, the instinctive, and the rebellious are reclaimed as vital forces. The exhibition spans fifteen years of Raynal’s unique artistic journey, marked by an ongoing dialogue between her Normandy studio and residencies in marginalized spaces—prisons, hospitals, convents. In these settings, she creates clay portraits shaped by encounters with people often living on society’s edge. Back in the studio, she builds upon these experiences, weaving them into a wider tapestry of myths, stories, and literary references. The resulting works give life to hybrid creatures—part human, part animal—suggesting a shared language and intimate connection between humans and beasts.
  • Creator:
    Cécile Raynal (1966, French)
  • Creation Year:
    2025
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 33.08 in (84 cm)Width: 11.03 in (28 cm)Depth: 18.9 in (48 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    Paris, FR
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU803116746832

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