It was grace
Stunned by the last lights of the sun
Swimming in a green sea as deep as a drum
There are things I must record, must praise
There are things I have to say about the fullness
And the blaze of this beautiful life
Of this beautiful life

Kae Tempest - Grace (2022)

«When you cremate the dead, it's kind of the living that burn. I think?» This is what Célia Muller wrote to me as she was creating the works for her exhibition. Faced with disappearance, she chooses to move. «To honor, to see the world, to see the sea, to see the mountains, to see the forest. I wanted to put a lot of beauty into the hard. In these different journeys, one obsession: fire. Suddenly, in so many different aspects of my life, I found myself surrounded by flames. In the media, book titles, music, films...». So, in shades of black and light, the artist presents us as much with a burnt-out existence, virtually reduced to ashes, as with a transformation, a veritable rebirth. In this way, she continues her long-term reflection on the disappearance, dissolution and reminiscence of memories, bodies, objects and stories. Dedicated, too, to what remains - «little bits of life» - despite destruction. Fire, as a primordial element, thus becomes a place of passage. Like the diptych entitled Snow in August (2025), where we meet two people separated by a large fire. They face each other and seem to be looking at each other. Yet this image is constructed from anonymous archival photographs. Two temporalities, two contexts, two bodies are linked by the blaze, which can be understood as a mirror or a portal.

As usual, Célia Muller works with both archival images and botched photographs taken with her phone. This mix allows her to create a discreet distance between her intimate story and the collective. The latter adopts a collective dimension that clashes as much with the torments of the past as with present realities. «In the studio, when I was making the fire, there were times when there were lots of cold white ashes that flew up and fell gently all over the space. A bit like snow. For the cold in the heart at a time of year that's supposed to be warm, gentle». Broken china on the floor, illegible letters, lumps of coal, smoky beams. Fire ravages. With the Leftovers (2025), we understand that the intimate is surpassed by a global situation: the mega-fires spreading across all continents, the burnt human bodies in Gaza, the ashes of bombed buildings in Ukraine, the fires of civil war in Congo and so many other flames on Earth. These burning situations obviously echo other contexts and other historical events. Through fire and ashes, Célia Muller stretches her story towards a political awareness of an unbalanced and uncomfortable commonality.

Fire can also contain a softer, more festive, joyful memory: lighting a cigarette, holding out a lighter during a concert, building a fire on the beach or in the forest with friends, warming up by the fireplace, gathering around a fire during a demonstration. «Fire contains vital energy, a desire for creativity, for sharing, for doing, a liberation, an escape, an exhilarating letting go. In a perspective that transcends the question of time, Célia Muller's latest works contain these memories and experiences that run through our bodies. For several years now, she has been working with the elements (water, fire, air, earth) to translate with lampblack and dry pastels what we are unable to verbalize: deep feelings, intense experiences, intimate losses and metamorphoses. In this way, the artist works with amazement and contemplation, melancholy and euphoria. So, from the initiatory portal to the warm place, through destruction, purification, energy, passion, fear, beauty, anger, mourning, fascination, comfort, ecstasy, violence and spirituality, fire conjures up paradoxical feelings and states that innervate our lives as they ineluctably burn away.

Julie Crenn