Julian Charrière
A Stone Dream Of You
Apr 4th – May 3rd, 2025
Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf
A Dreamology of Geology
Pierre Jardin
Julian Charrière’s A Stone Dream of You proposes a dreamology of geology. Probing planetary and psychic depths, Charrière extends what the Earth expresses, intervening intimately in its geologic processes. Mobilizing ground-breaking methods across multiple media, he unearths subterranean materials and metamorphoses them into complex compositions. These works emanate telluric lurings, stirring a primordial urge to merge with the Earth. Charrière’s chthonic art embodies the “material imagination,” Gaston Bachelard’s characterization of a creative capacity to activate “a kind of dialectical animism” between matter and mind—constellating an imaginary that “dreams in [matter], lives in it.” The works in this exhibition mold manifest geologic content into fantastic forms laden with latent fantasies: glassy black-eyed basalt creatures perhaps born in hydrothermal vents or borne by meteorites; archaic anthracite looking-glasses, slices of coalified life that place us face to trace with burdens we carry and truths we bury; cryptically conjured preternatural ecosystems combining cloud forest flora and Carboniferous fossils; murky charred landscapes and volcanic vortices whose sulfurous surfaces pour forth from a porous planet.
Charrière’s oneiric oeuvre conveys the Orphic qualities of a mystic artist who can roam the underworld and make stones dance. In addition to artistic dreams of geology, A Stone Dream of You exposes a scientific geology of dreams. Geology—interested in deformation and flow under stress—and dreamology—interested in distortion and association hindered by repression—display a common rheology. Both the rock cycle and dream cycle are driven by differential improvisational exchange in slurries of pent-up materials subjected to stress and strain vented by distilling and crystallizing into residual elements as they surface. Freud understood dreams in geologic terms, comparing dream-work to breccia, a matrix binding together disparate elements. More broadly, he described dream activity as creative destruction in terms evocative of plate tectonics, volcanism, or metamorphism: “It has not only torn [materials] from their context and mutilated them … but it has also joined them together in a new way.” This geo-oneiric process of extraction, breakage, and fusion unfolds in Charrière’s excavating, slicing, and polishing coal boulders in Coalface or inserting obsidian balls in hollowed out basalt bound back together with ground stone and adhesive compounds in A Stone Dream of You. Conglomerating slow-cooling, coarse-grained basalt and fast-cooling, smooth volcanic glass gives geologic expression to the dream-logic of fusing contrasting contents in a single flow. A similar condensation informs the double exposure piezographs of Sun Sets in Stone, printed in ground coal pigment.
Julian Charrière is an Animaterialist artist, aesthetically animated and absorbed by the mineral materials he physically animates and absorbs.1 That being said, his work aims not to bring stones to life or propound a New Materialist view of rocks as ‘vibrant matter.’ Instead, the Animaterialist affirms that vitality is mineralogical, that mineralization preceded and originated life. Operating at a cusp that queers bios and geos, Charrière discards any dualism between mortal life and indestructible stone, dreaming instead a living-dying Earth caught in moments of formation-deformation. The tephra composite photolithographs in After the Smoke Cradle conjure underworldly worlds breathed into being by an expiring Earth, haunting portals that submerge us in deep time. The eerie, elusive nature of this terrestrial temporality is captured in poet Francis Ponge’s poignant pronouncement that, “Since stone does not recreate itself, it is the only thing in nature that is constantly dying.” In Charrière’s fabrications, stone is not timeless but restless, suspended between eruption and erosion—a fleeting dream leaving a lasting impression.
Bio note: Pierre Jardin is a rock gardener and stone whisperer based in Long Beach, California. Under the pseudonym Paul A. Harris, he is a Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University.
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1 On animaterialism and absorbing stone, see Paul A. Harris, “Stoned Thinking: The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin” in Rock Records: SubStance issue 146 Vol 47, no. 2, 2018: pp. 119-148. See also Harris, “The Path of Animaterialism,” in The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin. SubStance@Work, 2019. http://substancejournal.sites.lmu.edu/petriverse/index
