Vive la terre vernissée

Jean-Nicolas Gérard is often described as a man of few words. His mode of communication is through ceramic and cooking, aligning his life, day to day and career-wide, to the core values of good food from good pots. 

Gérard has early memories of clay under foot, running barefoot through forests in his birthplace of Brazzaville, Congo (1954) and later in France where he moved in 1961. This signals Gérard’s formative connection with clay as a material of the earth. But of clay in the hand, Gérard remembers forming a small piglet at a pottery near his home. From there the artist describes his journey into clay as simply by chance, ‘it just happened completely naturally’. 

ROOTS IN CLAY

In 1976, with nothing more than a feel for clay and a passing awareness of artisanal pottery in regional France, Gérard embarked upon studies at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Aix-en-Provence, in the studio of Jean Biagini. The ceramicist had worked in the US and Japan, Gérard describes him having a ‘wonderful open mind and attitude towards ceramics.’ Under his tutelage, Gérard developed great knowledge and skill that has allowed him his own travels to China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Africa and the USA and UK. 

Following his graduation from the Ecole des Beaux Art, in 1979 Gérard apprenticed in the studios of Claire Bogino and Paul Salmona, both slipware (terre vernissée in French) artists. Gérard was immediately drawn to the method for its simplicity. Admitting he has little interest in experimenting with glazes, he sees slipware ‘as a very complete way of making’. He describes: ‘one clay to make the pots, another clay for the slip, and afterwards you added copper, cobalt, iron to this clay to make colours. And that was it!’ And so, Gérard has been working with slipware for over 40 years. 

Slipware has a significant historic aesthetic burden that ties it to a certain sense of traditionalism and regionality. It was this kind of artisanal slipware that was still common in France during Gérard’s formative years and which he has worked to move away from throughout his career. Gérard’s pots are odes to their material reality, expressions of the texture and plasticity of clay, the gravity of glaze drips and the hands that bring these elements together: finger blobs of slip, prints in pressed rims, full bodily sweeps in the sgraffito-ed lines. These pots are about the hands that form, mix and gouge clay into pots, platters, beakers and bowls. Despite the natural materials he uses, Gérard achieves a vibrancy in the pairing and placement of colour: blue against yellow, white on black, the rich brown of raw clay peeking through an etched mark.

POTTERY AND PURPOSE

Jean-Nicolas Gérard’s work could be understood as a contemporary offshoot of slip-glazed artisanal wares, made by the hands that use them, for the preparation and presentation of food within the home. In a way, Gérard continues such traditions in the intentions of his work. He grows his own food, prepares and cooks it, and makes the vessels to present it and for his frequent guests to eat it from. He says ‘I really like cooking. It’s true that pots are a great accompaniment, it adds something … it’s better’ and as such, he has an innate awareness of how to make the most of his food, what a table needs to serve a feast and what the guest needs to enjoy it. The thick earthen clay bodies retain and return the heat of the food and match the balmy warmth of the Southern French summer, the sweeping and often whimsical patterns conjure feelings of hearty homeliness and unpretentious eating. They are decorated with the colours of nature, mirrored in their surrounding landscape, reassuring even in a relentlessly grey England, his slip work reinforces the home-grown honest nature of the pots and the food. 

Each ceramic piece is made, not just with an aesthetic vision, but with function in mind: ‘I like my pots to be used, so I want to make pots that people want to use. Vases to put flowers in, bowls for fruit and vegetables, cups for coffee.’ For example, Gérard gives every beaker a little squeeze whilst the clay is still pliable so it will fit perfectly in your hand as you drink from it. It is hyper-functional, not just useful but easy and a joy to use, but it is also a mark of the maker. Your hand sits within his and effects an everlasting connection between user and artist. He says: ‘I like to leave lots of marks on the pots – fingerprints, marks like that. Because I’m here, right? This hasn’t been made by a machine, it has been made by a person with their hands’. 

In this, his work enacts an almost post-industrial temperament that challenges the ubiquity of the factory-made ceramics that clutter people’s everyday lives. For, from this overwhelming churn of cups, mugs, plates and bowls, the anonymous and mass-produced ware has marked a shift from the sensual ritual of providing sustenance, from breaking bread together as a communion act (even in a secular sense), to a mere chore, to receive fuel only to continue with tasks of the day. Gérard’s pieces act to counter this, to reinstate the ritual of your morning coffee, of serving food to share, of appreciating the journey to the bottom of the bowl and revelling in the beauty of that destination. Many admirers of Gérard’s work describe it as just that, a celebrated daily act, and this in fact is how Gérard came to be represented at Goldmark Gallery in Uppingham. Gallery director Mike Goldmark began buying Gérard’s work from pottery fairs to use at home with his wife. Soon realising its capacity to elevate even the simplest meal, making every day an occasion, he approached Gérard to represent and exhibit his work exclusively in the UK. 

Gérard begins most days with an hour or two in his garden before going to his studio. It allows him time to reflect and work on something ‘for the sake of beauty’. The studio, at Valensole in the Alpes-de-Hautes-Provence, has been his home for over 30 years now. The space is busy and bright, earthen coloured walls are dotted with slip handprints and large bay windows deliver pools of light upon his tools of work: a throwing wheel, tin baths for glaze, shelf upon shelf for newly made pots awaiting the kiln. All are scattered with pictures and objects that he enjoys – postcards by Matisse and Bonnard, bells made by students and clay animals that hang from the ceiling. Everything is covered in splashes of slip, indicative of the artist’s freedom of gesture when decorating his works. 

Gérard focuses on decoration that accentuates the natural feel of his work, an inclination that he attributes to a keen interest in Japanese ceramic during his apprentice-years. He describes how he admires the work of artists such as Matisse and Pierre Bonnard and musicians like John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk, he also takes inspiration from the beauty and imperfection of nature, the landscape around Valensole: ‘it is important to have the essence of that in my work.’ Often Gérard doesn’t begin work with a plan but decorates in series, performing quick successional movements across one pot after another, so the action becomes almost instinctive with no hesitation, ‘I don’t try to control my technique, so I’m quite used to surprises’. The artist embraces every eventuality, paying particular attention to the accidents that occur but, almost contrary, this takes confidence and practice, marks and colourations are not born just by chance but by experience with the material and the intention of the work. Gérard states ‘I don’t know if its decoration that I do, I think it’s just bringing the piece to life’. And it is from this that Gérard describes receiving the greatest inspiration: ‘what really influences me is to look closely at what I am doing, and to especially look at the accidents.’ In a final act of difference, Gérard, unlike most slipware potters, uses a reduction firing allowing for more unexpected results in the unique colours and textures of his clay and slip surfaces. 

CRAFTING FORM

Recently, Gérard has been pushing his work in new directions and often he is surprised by the results. Most strikingly, Gérard has taken to making pots in several parts, some thrown, some coiled and in bringing together these disparate elements he says: ‘you arrive at things that you didn’t expect’. Much like his approach to decoration, his renewed approach to form is to ‘try to make them feel alive, to include those little accidents … those little things that happen spontaneously, which give it that life.’ This has emerged also in new colour ways, moving away from a natural palette towards an almost pop aesthetic: clean white backgrounds host bright blobs in red and orange, purple and blue, adorned by a more graphic pictorial sgraffito. Gérard pushes terre vernissée into further contemporary realms.

It would be too simple and indeed, wholly wrong, to describe Gérard’s work as ‘naïve’. The informality of form, the loose structure and untrimmed edges, the free-flowing surface colouring and gestural mark-making, could all be accounted by the disinterested viewer as a lack of skill. But the viewer that takes a closer look, notices the romance and beauty in this, and is rewarded with the realisation that such rich and comfortable use of clay and slip-glazing comes only from great familiarity of material and honed craftsmanship. And, indeed, this is Gérard’s great desire for his work, for people to go further than just glancing, he asks you to ‘take the time to lose yourself in them a little bit … you need to stay in front of a pot like you would stay in front of a painting for a little while – to look at it, to scrutinise, to see what is happening with it.’ For it is there that you will notice the spontaneous, the unexpected, the little accidents. 

An exhibition of new ceramics by Jean-Nicolas Gérard will be on display at Goldmark Gallery, Uppingham, from 28 September 2024. 

For more details visit goldmarkart.com