Emmanuel Boos — Je t’aime moi non plus — Jousse Entreprise — Mobilier d'architecte Paris Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 13 → February 25, 2018

Emmanuel Boos loves ceramic glaze, which is the object of his artistic practice. Glaze is the glassy coating covering the body of a ceramic piece. In short, glaze can be considered a ceramic paint or colour but Emmanuel Boos sees much more in it: for Boos, glaze is both a new material and a poetic space.

Emmanuel Boos, © Galerie Jousse Entreprise — Mobilier d’architecte Paris

Initially, glaze is a powder composed of minerals which the artist covers blindly the ceramic with: he cannot really predict the end result (at least not as with a painting). The end result is always the surprise of a new material. By doing so, Emmanuel Boos explores materials and the physical and chemical phenomenon at work in the ceramic process. This exploration of materials is the chore of his artistic practice but it is not exactly scientific. Boos is rather a lover: intimacy with his medium allows him to develop a playful relation with it. Claude Lévi-Strauss describes the jealousy of the potter which strives to master and retain what always threatens to escape him. But Boos does not try to dominate nor control. His goal is to develop a relation based on play and love with chaos. His works allow and even provoke chance. He hunts the unexpected, risking accidents. Because he accepts to lose control, the artist contemplates the poetic, sensual and even the erotic dimension of the ceramic materials triggering his obsessions: drops, collapses, colour and texture changes but also holes and slits in body and glaze. The artist renounces demonstrative claims to virtuosity and steps aside to let ceramic materials glare. He wishes to become partners experiencing the alterity of lovers: beauty and poetry and failings and limits. Love and Hatred of ceramic glaze. The ceramic of Emmanuel Boos is a kind of artistic and poetic practice of desire.

Emmanuel Boos, © Galerie Jousse Entreprise — Mobilier d’architecte Paris

Over the last few years, Boos has focused on enclosed shapes, apparently full: cobblestones, cubes, boxes or books, they are mysterious and abstract. Like blocks of pure glaze, whose aspect reflect density. This is interest for the ceramic surface lead him to raise the question of depth in a ceramic glaze and to investigate its relation to painting but especially its own specificity. Therefore, his work retain an ambiguity of sorts: they are both surface and volume: wall pieces are also sculptural.

———

Emmanuel Boos shows his first creations made during his current residency at the Sèvres Porcelain Manufacture in Paris.

Sèvres Monoliths (2017)

Emmanuel Boos is an artist in residence at the Sèvres Manufacture since October 2016. In the wake of his enclosed forms, both surface and volume, Emmanuel Boos has developed at Sèvres series of porcelain monoliths. Initially cast from a perfect rectangular model, the artist confronts this modernist, minimalist and rationalist symbol with the objectivity of ceramic materials and processes full of surprises and imperfections which are sometimes provoked but are most of the time accidental.

It is the case of the work The Kiss: two monoliths set side to side in the kiln which collapsed accidentally on one another during firing to remain forever linked in a kiss of glaze.