Erskine, Hall & Coe is pleased to present a new exhibition, 8 Artistes & la Terre, open from the 11th December 2013 through the 24th January 2014.

This comprises of over thirty works by Claude Champy, Bernard Dejonghe, Philippe Godderidge, Jacqueline Lerat, Michel Muraour, Setsuko Nagasawa, Daniel Pontoreau and Camille Virot. These artists currently work in France and were first brought together by a book, '8 artistes & la terre,' published by Argile Editions in 2009. Following in the footsteps of the group's show at Musée Ariana in Geneva, this exhibition marks the first time these artists have shown together as a group in the UK.

Claude Champy .The bard of ceramics with his untamed hair and tousled moustache, Claude Champy envisaged his life as a potter. He was to be an “artist-potter”. After designing utilitarian objects, he gradually incorporated painting and sculpture into his work. He decorates his pieces – of asymmetrical forms and uneven surfaces – with different layers (generally two) of superimposed enamels, that are spread over, poured on or projected (with a ladle and/or by brush), in order to bring a different dimension to his creations. The need to retain the object’s potential usage prevents him, however, from dedicating them all to contemplation and meditation. Alongside his mural panels and his Sphères, Lames and Murailles, he therefore continues to produce dishes, boxes, vases… even if all the latter are often gashed, thus losing their primary function.

Claude Champy is perfectly aware of the element of chance as a factor in his creative process. Indeed, he often sees himself as a mere “co-author”, the fire taking care of the last stage of the work. His wood-fired kiln has, in effect, a character of its own: it operates on the pieces (distorting the clay, cracking the enamel and causing colour differences) and gives them back to its companion transfigured… or mutilated! The inconsistency of the firing (lasting up to about twenty hours), the variations in temperature in different zones of the kiln (1200 – 1300°C), the addition of ashes and salt (glaze) randomly deposited following the path of the flames, bring a touch of the unexpected: the wood-fired kiln accords its blessing or sanctions.

This intuitive approach to clay, which Claude Champy wishes to be more unconscious than cerebral, tends towards the pure, original act. It has moreover led him to state: “As for me, when I do reflect, it’s quite a long time afterwards […] I’m more into doing than knowing. As for know-how, I do what I can” (8 artistes & la terre, éd. ARgile, Banon, 2009). Such nonchalant modesty should not obscure his mastery of technical constraints and shared complicity with the material (over forty years’ experience), or the expressive force and the subtle simplicity emanating from his art.

Born in 1944, Claude Champy has received numerous awards for his oeuvre: an honorary diploma from the Biennale Internationale de Vallauris (1976), Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1986), the Grand Prize of the Tokyo Suntory Museum (1988), the Bavarian State Award (1996), first prize in the Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Award (1997), etc. Over the last fifteen years, he has regularly exhibited in several European countries, as well as in Japan, China, the United States and Australia, thus becoming one of the internationally-renowned French ceramists.

Bernard Dejonghe . Is Dejonghe more a being of clay and fire than one of flesh and blood? To write that he communes with the earth and the mineral world would be something of an understatement for one who regularly paces the deserts of the globe and collects fragments of stones and star dust. Dejonghe favours neither concept nor material; he defends no particular aesthetic. He has simply chosen clay as a field/support for experimentation and for reflection on possibilities, in order to explore a constantly changing sphere where “energies” are produced, intersect and come together. His choices often transgress artistic codes, but this is not where his ambition lies. This artist is forever devising original recipes: the mixture and fusion of the different minerals comprising ceramic and glass, in search of a new alchemy. The work is hard, physical and seen as a total act. Dejonghe is captivated by the effects of geological time and his curiosity has led him to seek his own means of expression (not even waiting for his diploma from the École des métiers d’art!). Over the course of his travels in the Sahara, the artist discovered “the enamel fallen from the sky”: fragments of meteorites transformed during their fusional passage through the atmosphere. It is not just a question of pushing back the limits, but rather of taking the risk of confronting them, of experimenting with the reactions of the material – of the enamel in the kiln – so as to encounter the unexpected, to learn the material’s language. “All my work is constructed in this way, I progress through small repetitions and I follow the paths that open before me, to which I try to open myself. A kind of automatic writing using difficult materials over a long period of time. My work is a slow journey.” A sculptor of the extreme, Dejonghe oscillates between clay and glass depending on where his curiosity takes him and at the price of his passion, perhaps in order to open partially the many doors that communicate with the elements, nature, mountains, the sky, the universe.

Confusing the issue, Dejonghe has entitled the five mural pieces Areshima, a Japanese sounding name but which comes in fact from a Tenerian Neolithic site. Suggesting a carapace, a shield or a volcanic bulge, these forms are nonetheless borrowed from grooved axes, tools of the same period. More often, Dejonghe creates visually simple forms: triangle or tripod, square or cube, circle or curve, rectangle, line, that he lays down, hangs up, suspends or places, horizontally or vertically. His research into forms and colours does not take precedence; the whole becomes almost naturally part of a given space and time. “Each object has its own presence and each group or association of objects has its own presence.” Each spatial or “presence” arrangement is a pretext for interconnection. All is language and sign, but nothing is written forever. The Formes brèves, graphic sculptures whose contours seem drawn that very instant and to suspend time, due to the play of transparency and light, are massive blocks of optical glass. They hold no other meaning for the artist than that of their simple presence.

Born in 1942 in Chantilly, Dejonghe studied at the École des métiers d’art in Paris. After having taken over the former studio of Émile Decoeur at Fontenay-aux-Roses, he moved to Briançonnet (Alpes Maritimes) in 1977 where, in a mountain setting, he first built a 9 cubic metres Noborigama kiln and then his studio around it. The artist has participated in over fifty exhibitions, mainly in Europe and Asia. The recipient of many awards, he has notably been accorded the Grand Prix national by the French Ministry of Culture (Paris, 1995) and the Prix Bettencourt pour l’intelligence de la main (2001). His works feature in prestigious public collections in Europe, Asia and the United States.

Philippe Godderidge asks questions, constantly. He structures his thoughts and practice as his inquiries advance, in the course of daily discoveries, through responses or partial responses which often raise new issues. “Thirty-two years of work to demonstrate everything I thought I knew then […] it’s all become more empirical, more sensitive, less controlled… less sure. Can we talk about development? Can we talk about advances? Progress? Whereas over these past thirty years, it’s just been a question of abandonment, of letting go. It’s all been about unlearning the rules of the art and accepting the risk of an improbable, surprising result.” The artist has evolved in a melting pot of doubts and beliefs, certain of his commitment, even if each piece remains subject to all this questioning.Godderidge is profoundly human. He creates objects on his own scale, in our image, but which refer to the world and to ancient as well as to present times. “In my ceramic history, everything carries me back to the image of the body: the foot-sized brick, the hand-sized bowl, as well as the anthropomorphic representation of the pot and its vocabulary (foot, neck, belly)… and its purpose: from the food container to the urn for ashes or bones.” Philippe Godderidge creates pots to serve his artistic, sculptural discourse; he has chosen the pot as the figurative and symbolic form of our relation to nature, of our relation to the other. “Making a pot is already to experience the void. Making pottery is for me a way of creating sculpture. And so that there’s no ambiguity, I make fragile, unusable pots with holes in them, pots that you can only look at or touch and which will only serve for reflection… and to reflect yourself in them.”

In his work, Godderidge often favours the “installative” mode ; he regards ceramic practice as an activity within the field of contemporary art and as “developing your own language, your own thinking on the basis of your own materials, tools, gestures, history, including your own mythology.” Godderidge is a fighter. He dislikes the hierarchical organisation of things and is more interested in what happens “on the fringes”, through chance encounters with objects, ideas, moments or through interaction with another. “I like the fact that my work constantly oscillates between the object and the installation, between pottery and sculpture, and that the propositions are systematically brought into question for other eventualities, on the very limit of things that I can accept at the time. Everything has to compete for a little more freedom every day.”

Born in 1955, Philippe Godderidge came to contemporary art through ceramics. In 1982, he set up his studio on a small community farm at Torteval-Quesnay (Normandy). He also writes, draws, does performances and regularly contributes to workshops. He has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions, mainly in France.

Jacqueline Lerat . An emblematic figure of the French ceramic scene, Jacqueline Lerat passed away in 2009, shortly before the publication of the book 8 artistes & la terre. In a space entirely devoted to her, this exhibition pays tribute to her oftenpraised humanity, great sensitivity and generosity, as well as to her central role in research and teaching within this discipline. A chronological presentation has been selected to provide an overview of the evolution of her work while highlighting some of the subjects and forms that obsessed her. This produces a landscape of sentinels, inhabiting the highly personal world she created for herself.

Jacqueline Lerat’s oeuvre has often been regarded as inseparable from that of her husband, the ceramist Jean Lerat. They worked side-by-side, in symbiosis, mutually influencing each other. In 1948, they started co-signing their pieces JJ Lerat as if to become one. The time they spent in the traditional village of potters of La Borne (department of Cher) was to prove crucial. They developed their ceramic practice there through the use of a mixture of local earths. For them, this clay had real significance: it had a soul, a past. The couple, moreover, always kept this studio in La Borne. Together, they experimented with this medium via a unique material, sandstone. They introduced salt at the end of the firing and employed enamels produced from a variety of tree ashes.

A palpable tension emanates from her works, in which verticality is almost omnipresent. Her work on balance is also derived from this vertical construction. Certain shapes embody instability, the body in movement. The human figure is present but seems to disappear in the pursuit of abstraction, though still remaining perceptible (Sculpture anthropomorphique sur une brique, 1980). The force of her work resides in the vitality she infused into her creations: her desire was to “convey [her] body’s inner movement” (L’être et la forme, rencontre avec Jacqueline Lerat, céramiste, film by Jeanne Haddorn, 2007).

Nature and the body are central to Jacqueline Lerat’s thinking. Nevertheless, certain pieces hinge on different subjects developed by the artist through which, in her quest for harmony, she challenges our relationship to things and poetically pushes back established boundaries.

Jacqueline Bouvet was born at Bonneville in Haute-Savoie in 1920. Trained at the École municipale de dessin in Mâcon, then at the École des arts décoratifs in Paris, she began her ceramic work in a studio in Saint-Laurent-les- Mâcon in 1941, before setting one up at La Borne two years later. Her work was influenced by traditional, folk as well as religious art. She and Jean took over Paul Beyer’s ceramics studio, who had had the first individual Sèvres type kiln constructed there with an external firebox and a reverse flame inside the firing chamber. In 1982, Jacqueline Lerat was awarded the Grand Prix National of the French Ministry of Culture alongside her husband Jean.

Michel Muraour . Difficult to describe in a few words the rich career led by Michel Muraour since the 1960s. The expression employed by Carole Andréani in her 1998 article devoted to the “nomadic ceramist” (Revue de la céramique et du verre, no 103) still seems to characterise him best.

However, it was in Barcelona, at La Escuela Massana (School of Applied Arts), that he met José Llorens Artigas, a Catalan ceramist, notably famous for his collaborations with Raoul Dufy, Albert Marquet and later with Joan Miró. Through this contact with Artigas, and after having glimpsed the possibilities offered by wood firing, Michel Muraour was encouraged to follow the path offered by ceramics.

In 1982, after several collaborations in Spain and in France (with artists such as Joan Miró, Hans Hartung or Eduardo Chillida), he moved to Fox-Amphoux in south-eastern France where he constructed a wood-fired kiln whose dimensions prompted him to design large pieces. Long-influenced by the work of Artigas, he neglected the wheel himself to devote his time and expertise to the numerous artists who came to produce commissioned works or exhibition projects in his studio.

In the 1990s, the first Troncs de palmiers appeared, sculptures in grogged clay, either untreated or covered with ash and wood-fired in a kiln at 1300°C. Michel Muraour achieved this result after attempting to coil large jars. Unaccustomed to this technique, he adapted his original project and, with the help of a template, constructed irregular columns, which reminded him of the structure of palm tree trunks. This stage, which would prove decisive, led him to address simultaneously the issues of both the sculptor and the potter. Other forms have since supplemented his oeuvre. More compact (Cubes or Cylindres), they come closer to the principle of César’s compressions, which he has greatly admired.

Born in Grasse in 1943, Michel Muraour started his training at the École des beaux-arts in Bourges and then at the École des arts décoratifs in Nice, setting his sights on the creation of forms for industry. Ceramics gave him the means to attain his objective. Little seen in France, Michel Muraour’s work has mainly been exhibited in Sweden, especially in conjunction with artists who joined him at Fox-Amphoux, and with the Swedish artist Angelica Julner, who shares his life and his studio. He moreover curated the exhibition Terres et feu autour de la Méditerranée (Fox-Amphoux, 2006) and co-curated the exhibition Jarre with the Giselheid Grandberger gallery (Sweden 2000/2001). After having modelled clay and tackled enamelled lava, Michel Muraour is now passionate about working with images and says that he “practises photography as he would ceramics”.

Setsuko Nagasawa . Born in Kyoto to a family respectful of tradition, yet receptive to modernity, Setsuko Nagasawa followed a long artistic training, divided between Japan, United States and Switzerland. This singular grounding, accompanied by the opening of her first studio in 1967 (Kyoto) and by an exhibition in Geneva in 1977 that was to mark the real start of her artistic career, has notably permitted her to express her creativity in various fields.

First centring on the issue of the recipient, Setsuko Nagasawa gradually refined the form of her pieces. She next abandoned any utilitarian references in order to address the sculptural aspect of ceramics. Her experimental period was followed by research into space that would lead, on one hand, to the creation of installations (employing diverse materials) and, on the other, to the practice of architectural intervention (fountains, columbarium, etc.).

In 1994, she presented the Polyèdres, ceramic sculptures inspired by geometric volumes. Other forms have since made their appearance. Composed in this case of orange clay or porcelain, these pieces are given two successive firings: the first (around 900°C) produces the solid bisque, the second, in a reducing atmosphere (at around 850°C), forces the flames given off by the combustion to penetrate and to partially colour the oeuvre.

The distortion of the clay during firing tends to distance these works from pure geometry, thus revealing the contractions of the material. Setsuko Nagasawa says of this that “[she likes] presenting the space with objects that act above all as fields of tension”.

Setsuko Nagasawa has regularly exhibited since the 1960s, principally in Europe and Japan, but also in the United States. She taught her art at the Ateliers pluridisciplinaires d’expression plastique de Fontblanche (Vitrolles, France) between 1977 and 1979 and at the École des arts décoratifs and the École des beaux-arts in Geneva, respectively from 1979 to 2005 and from 1991 to 2005. She was notably nominated as an expert to the Swiss Federal Office of Culture in 1995 and occupied the position of vice-president of the International Academy of Ceramics from 2002 to 2008. She remains simultaneously active today in several fields of experimentation (installations, sculptures, recipients, design).

Daniel Pontoreau belongs to an artistic “(step)family”. He cannot and refuses to be pigeonholed into a particular category, for he is “hungry to explore, to understand sometimes very contrasting means of expression”. Always passionate about painting, he nevertheless chose sculpture in order to convey in a highly poetic manner a certain vision of reality. Although the artist favours the rhetoric of abstraction and of the “non-form”, it is perhaps because he does not wish to restrict things to a single interpretation. This means that spectators are not limited to just one mental image of his work, but can always see it in a new light: like a landscape contemplated at dawn, or from the heights of a grassy hill, or in bright sunshine with light flooding into all its folds. Pontoreau is not interested in the isolated work, per se; it does not exist. Each sculpture blends with its environment and has to be seen in all the richness of its entirety.

Daniel Pontoreau’s work is imbued with theatricality. Giving free rein to an extremely intuitive creative process, he sculpts an inseparable whole in which each element also contributes to the final result: the material, the light, the hand, the tool, the mind, the empty space. “The object cannot be presented as unique and isolated from the world. I can’t look at ceramics in an exhibition and not remember the bases on which they’re placed.” The object thus installed takes on a different significance on each occasion through its interaction with its environment at the time. Everything makes sense, at each moment, including “the mental and physical displacement” of the encounter between the oeuvre-space and the observer. “I sense a fusional relationship between the forms and the space, as though the void has become palpable. The void assumes a depth, a different density, according to the interactions the objects establish between themselves.”

Pontoreau adopts an entirely practical and experimental approach to sculpture: a working base for a lifetime of research. He taught himself sculpture “out of my interest in a wide range of techniques, the physical and spatial organisation of things”. Working with clay became an obvious choice for the artist because “you can do (almost) anything with clay; it can be hit, rolled, stretched, dried, diluted, dissolved, broken up, fired, smashed, ground, sanded, polished, mixed, kneaded… or you can even do nothing with it, look at it, collect it in all its states”. Daniel Pontoreau advocates decompartmentalization and the co-existence of artistic practices on a non-hierarchical basis: a courageous position that can isolate an artist, notably from the art market.

Born in 1947 and “gradually” becoming a sculptor, Daniel Pontoreau has developed a genuine reflection on space over the course of more than forty years. He lives and works in the Paris region at Acy-en-Multien (Oise) and in Asfalou (Morocco). He has notably exhibited in France, South Korea, China and Japan and has produced numerous public commissions related to architecture and landscape. His work is found in several French and international public collections.

Camille Virot has been greatly influenced by Africa, where he discovered villages of women potters and their ancient craft traditions. Ceramics then became a necessity for him, a means of expression, a way of life. Virot lives his art alone and with very limited means. He adopted raku, a technique developed in Japan in the 16th century and intimately linked to the tea ceremony. Virot embraced raku as an attitude, a relation to clay and to the world. His approach is situated somewhere between technical mastery and detachment from the object. Indeed, the “accidents” of firing or imperfections (enamels, glazes) are accepted and considered an integral part of the piece. Each object is individually fired and subjected to thermal shocks (rapid cooling). The unexpected, the element of chance, the instinctive dimension and the spontaneity of the artist’s hand are primordial. The technique of raku is hard to describe accurately today, as the parameters are so variable and offer ceramists infinite possibilities: every item created is consequently unique.

Virot sees ceramics as “the recycling of a debased material”. He improvises, making use of whatever comes to hand. His artistic practice is adaptable, able to be carried out both outdoors and indoors; it is in some way nomadic. Aggregates are of special importance to Virot. He incorporates foreign elements such as concrete, glass fragments or pottery shards. He combines a variety of shaping techniques for certain pieces, of which part will be thrown and the rest press moulded. The area of intersection is very highly worked, connecting as it does the different parts of the object.

However, despite this great technical diversity, there is one constant throughout Camille Virot’s work: the bowl, a primeval form, that he regards as “the total ceramic object”. Associated with the body and with movement, the bowl is initially a void, around which the artist constructs his oeuvre.

Two aspects of his current work are presented in the exhibition. Three showcases devoted to raku contain objects which are essentially variations on the “founding” form that is the bowl. A series of pieces whose common denominator is “white” occupies the remaining display cases.

Camille Virot was born in Franche-Comté in 1947. He trained first in the architecture studio of the École des beaux-arts in Besançon, then from 1968 onwards in the ceramics studio. He spent two years in Africa as a volunteer teacher for his national service. In 1970, impressed by the work of Daniel de Montmollin and René Ben Lisa, he attended – as a non-student – the ceramics studio of Mr Wattel at the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg. The following year, he began making raku and set up his studio in a hamlet in Haute-Provence. Since 1976, Virot has taught in art schools and received interns at his studio. In 1985, he and his wife, Pascaline Virot, created the Dossiers d’Argile, an episodic publication devoted to reflections on living ceramics.

Erskine, Hall & Coe Gallery
15 Royal Arcade
28 Old Bond Street
London W1S 4SP United Kingdom
Ph. +44 (0)20 74911706
mail@erskinehallcoe.com
www.erskinehallcoe.com

Opening hours
Monday - Saturday
From 10am to 6pm

Related images

  1. Bernard Dejonghe (b. 1942), Bolis, III, 2013, stoneware, 28 x 52 x 24 cm
  2. Daniel Pontoreau (b. 1947), Pierre étoilée, stoneware with porcelain; porcelain slip, 20 x 32 x 26 cm
  3. Camille Virot (b. 1947), Bol, 2013, rake rouge, 11.5 x 15 cm
  4. Setsuko Nagasawa (b. 1941), Sculpture, 2008, stoneware, 42 cm long x 29 cm diameter
  5. Michel Muraour (b. 1943), Cylindre, 2011, 72 x 17 cm
  6. Philippe Godderidge (b. 1955), The Shelters I, 2013, terracotta and engobes on glazed brick