Emmanuel Boos: Noir C’est Noir
At Raisonné
At the Raisonné gallery in SoHo, four monumental porcelain coffee tables stand at the heart of the smashing solo show of award-winning French ceramicist Emmanuel Boos, called Noir C’est Noir. Each table is dramatic, architectural, and pristine, blending art and function. All of them are unlike anything I have seen before. Their dramatic scale is balanced by the restrained urban and industrial-type palettes, which made me think of the urban facades that work as the exterior of the streets of New York City. A colleague of mine who attended the opening night of the exhibition whispered, “I don’t know anyone who would not want those coffee tables at their homes.” I was intrigued by the artist’s exquisite vision, technique, and the journey that brought him to create these masterpieces of contemporary design. I discovered a fascinating man who is an artisan, an artist, and a scholar all at once.
What did I learn from Boos after spending nearly two hours over a Japanese lunch in the Upper East Side in Manhattan? That deep knowledge and passion for history are essential to the evolution of any creative mind, that education is the only engine and road to progress, and that any artistic career is a process of continuous learning. Not that I did not know all of this before, but our conversation certainly reinforced my own knowledge.
Many ceramicists today are occupied with the mission of crafting furniture in ceramics and moving clay from vessels and sculptures to furniture, and yet very few have done it successfully. I am not talking about furniture made in ceramic tiles—a practice popular at the turn of the 20th century with designers of the Arts and Crafts Movement and with several French ceramicists in the mid-century, where tiles were used as surfaces—but about clay dictating the design and vice versa, where authenticity is achieved through challenging the material, pushing boundaries, and reaching what has never been achieved before. With the introduction of handcraftsmanship to the interior space since the early years of the 21st century, accomplishing furniture in clay has become a triumph.
Boos’ entire oeuvre is on display at the exition — vessles, wall sculptures — but the furniture in porcelain is what grabbed my attention. They have grown from his lifelong journey and scholarship in the world of ceramics, from dreaming big and forging a career path, to scholarly study, and on to academic and practice inquiries. It is these authentic efforts that make his furniture intriguing, fresh, unexpected, and entirely beautiful. Boos found the formula after decades of exploration into the realm of the clay, filled with transitions and many new beginnings. His confidence and intuition are clearly communicated in the final products.
Boos devoted his career as a ceramicist to searching, reviving, and practicing glazes, becoming a virtuoso and a world’s expert in the field of glazes. For many ceramicists, clay is a tool to express narratives and memories. For Boos, the narrative itself is the technical achievement, and connecting to the past, with his ability to fuse innovative and traditional methods to create contemporary design in the most unexpected way. Whereas ceramicists today seek to craft contemporary design in seamless forms, for Boos, the objects are composed of repeated parts, where the seams are multiple, and those brick-form blocks are crafted in slabs of porcelain molded by hand. The process he has mastered is like poetry.
While his passion and work in clay has brought him to live in many places across the globe (such as China, Korea, Germany, and France) it was while he was in the US as a high school student in an exchange program that he was first introduced to ceramics. Exhibiting in the US for the first time is certaily closing of a circle. He was then trained as a potter in Paris and went to apprentice with Master of Art (Maître d’art, a distinguished titled awarded by the French Ministry of Culture to those of exceptional expertise who ought to pass it to the next generation) Jean Girel. Spending four years at Girel’s Burgundy-based studio formed the foundation, he learned from the master of the art of the glaze, while the two began mixing their own porcelain. The depth of the glazing has become the topic of his PhD dissertation at London’s Royal College of Art, and his fellowship at Sèvres, France’s national manufacture for porcelain brought another layer of depth to his work.
The 2024 Loewe Craft Prize Special Mention told me how he transitioned from the wall sculptures for which he became well known (represented by Galerie Jousse Enterprise), to furniture that happened by chance. This was when he was commissioned to create a fireplace. Now that he is moving his studio from Mannheim, Germany, back home to France, he is anticipating a new beginning as connecting with his past.
Photography: Zach Pontz for Raisonne.
