to a friendly relationship with chaos
At Raisonné in New York, Emmanuel Boos leads us Noir C’est Noir as it presents its crew of mischievous pottery collaborators. The tables, stools, vases, and bricks assembled for his first US solo show all bear the discipline of porcelain, but also hold evidence of what happened when the discipline gave way.
The “mistakes” that the French ceramic Celebrations take the form of misaligned seams, pools of excess glaze, and drooping surfaces that rest on top of each other for balance. Boos continues to return to this fine space between intention and behavior, noting that material behaves in ways he cannot fully plan but knows well enough to follow.
Emmanuel Boos | image © Zac Ponds
Emmanuel Boos first discovered ceramics during an exchange in the US, at a time when, he recalls, the medium had a different status in France. ‘I have something to do with the USA, because that’s where I discovered ceramics,‘ the ceramic says Raisonné’s New York designboom stoa. ‘At the time, it was not very popular in France. We are very cerebral, we don’t do many things with our hands.‘
From there, his path moved through China and South Korea, after apprenticeships in Paris and Burgundy. His later PhD at the Royal College of Art focused on glaze, a subject that still seems to be at the center of everything he makes.
image © Zach Ponz
a material with a mind of its own
Porcelain, for Boos, is never an empty surface waiting to be inspected. ‘Porcelain is a very difficult and difficult material to work with,‘ he says. ‘Some say he lives because he has a mind of his own and wants to do his own thing. And it really does. It has memory.‘
A slight pressure exerted during the formation of a piece may reappear after firing, even when the mark appears to have been corrected. Instead of treating these returns as errors to hide, it allows them to become part of the final instance of the object. ‘I can’t master it. These things always come up again, so I try to make the best of it.‘
image © Zach Ponz
This acceptance came through years of resistance. Emmanuel Boos talks about his own training in modernism, where still the concept of an artist or designer was someone who could master nature. ‘At my age, we were still educated with modernism,” he says. ‘We still believed we could dominate nature. So it wasn’t so easy to come up with that thought back then.‘
In a way, this mentality can be read through his works in Raisonné. His tables are made of brick and porcelain modules, their gridded surfaces almost architectural, but never quite regular. On the one hand, the works suggest order. Up close, they reveal small shifts, relaxation, seams and distortions.
image © Zach Ponz
functional ceramic works find beauty in awkwardness
For Noir C’est Noir, Boos developed new works in black and dark brown Tenmoku glazes, alongside celandines and persimmons. The exhibition brings together more than seventy unique pieces, such as coffee tables, side tables, stools, vases and sculptural-functional forms.
Many are made of repeating elements: bricks, squares, parallelepipeds, hollow units assembled into tables or standing as objects on their own. The pieces remain free and reconfigurable, held in place by balance, weight and in some cases wooden dowels.
image © Zach Ponz
‘That’s the trick,‘ explains. ‘To make them functional enough that you can define them as arrays and then have something in them that the queries work with and bring them to something else.‘
This slight dysfunction runs through the show. A table can hold a glass, but it also holds uneven surfaces and awkward gaps. A vase can hold flowers, but it can also fall, fold, or lean against another container for support. Even still, Boos seems to enjoy the awkwardness. There the use ceases to be automatic and begins to become a relationship.
