toward a friendly relationship with chaos
At Raisonné in New York, Emmanuel Boos walks us through Noir C’est Noir like he’s introducing his crew of disorderly ceramic collaborators. The tables, stools, vases, and brick-like modules gathered for his first solo exhibition in the US all carry the discipline of porcelain, but they also keep the evidence of what happened when discipline gave way.
The ‘errors’ which the French ceramicist celebrates take the form of misaligned seams, pools of excess glaze, and slumping surfaces which lean onto each another for balance. Boos keeps returning to this thin space between intention and behavior, noting that the material behaves in ways he can not fully plan, but knows well enough to follow.
Emmanuel Boos | image © Zach Pontz
Emmanuel Boos first discovered ceramics during an exchange in the U.S., at a time when, as he remembers it, the medium held a different status in France. ‘I have some relation with the U.S., because that’s where I discovered ceramics,’ the ceramicist tells designboom at Raisonné’s New York gallery. ‘At that time, it wasn’t very popular in France. We’re very cerebral, we don’t do a lot of things with our hands.’
From there, his path moved through China and South Korea, then through apprenticeships in Paris and Burgundy. His later PhD at the Royal College of Art focused on glaze, a subject that still seems to sit at the center of everything he makes.
image © Zach Pontz
a material with a mind of its own
Porcelain, for Boos, is never a blank surface waiting to be controlled. ‘Porcelain is a very difficult and tricky material to work with,’ he says. ‘Some people say it lives, because it has its own mind and wants to do its own things. And it really does. It has a memory.’
A small pressure applied while forming a piece can reappear after firing, even once the mark seems to have been corrected. Rather than treat those returns as errors to hide, he allows them to become part of the object’s final presence. ‘I can’t dominate it. Those things always surface up again, and so I’m trying to get the best out of it.’
image © Zach Pontz
This acceptance came through years of resistance. Emmanuel Boos speaks of his own education in modernism, where still the concept of an artist or designer was someone who could dominate nature. ‘At my age, we were still educated with modernism,’ he says. ‘We still believed we could dominate nature. So it wasn’t that easy to come up with that thought then.’
In a way, this mindset can be read through his works on view at Raisonné’. His tables are made from porcelain bricks and modules, their gridded surfaces nearly architectural, but never fully regular. On one hand, the works suggest order. Up close, they reveal small shifts, sags, seams, and warps.
image © Zach Pontz
functional ceramic works find beauty in awkwardness
For Noir C’est Noir, Boos developed new works in black and dark brown Tenmoku glazes, alongside celadons and kakis. The exhibition brings together more than seventy unique pieces, including coffee tables, side tables, stools, vases, and sculptural-functional forms.
Many are built from repeated elements: bricks, squares, parallelepipeds, hollow modules that gather into tables or stand as objects in their own right. The pieces remain free and reconfigurable, held in place by balance, weight, and in some cases wooden dowels.
image © Zach Pontz
‘That’s the trick,’ he explains. ‘To make them functional enough that you can set them as tables, and then have something in them that questions function and brings them toward something else.’
That slight disturbance of function runs through the show. A table can hold a glass, but it also holds uneven surfaces and inconvenient gaps. A vase can hold flowers, but it may also slump, fold, or lean into another vessel for support. Even still, Boos seems to enjoy the awkwardness. It’s where use stops being automatic and starts becoming a relationship.
