Ceramic Sculpture By Jean-françois Fouilhoux

Celadon glaze ceramic sculpture from the "horse" series, unic piece, circa 2009, signed.

He spent his childhood in Corbeil, Essonne, where he was born in 1947. At 13 or 14, his parents sent him to spend his free time with a ceramist, Daniel Cadot, a former student of the School of Applied Arts. Cadot naturally encouraged his student to follow in his footsteps. At 16, Jean-François Fouillhoux entered the School of Applied Arts. At 20, he graduated. There, he discovered a passion for modeling, sculpture, and drawing: his teacher, Roger Plin, appointed to the School of Fine Arts, brought some students there, but Jean-François Fouillhoux decided to become a ceramist. That summer, in Gargilesse, in the Indre region, he met the ceramist Guy Baudat: "I've always been involved in the ceramics world," he says. Dividing his time between schoolwork and a job as a model maker, he discovered a book on Chinese ceramics, a Massin edition, where large vases adorned with bamboo inspired his calligraphic designs. One of his teachers, Pierre Roulot, then encouraged him to see the recent donation of Chinese ceramics made by Mr. Calmann to the Guimet Museum. And there, in 1969, at the age of 22, Jean-François Fouilhoux stopped in front of the celadons, these stoneware pieces of Chinese tradition: during a reduction firing, their glaze, containing a little iron oxide, takes on shades between blue and green, and is imbued with a soft light. A vase, adorned with a tiger in relief, is forever etched in his memory as a ceramist: "this tiger coated in celadon, gelled, as if caught in a heavy cloak of green amber." Jean-François Fouilhoux had just discovered that "ceramics was not the design, but the 'matter' itself, molten rock." The piece "with the tiger" would remain his benchmark: "How many times, leaving my car badly parked in front of the Guimet Museum, I ran to the display case to place a test glaze against the glass, then another, as close as possible to the beast, to judge my progress, despairing of not being able to retain a mental image of the sensations felt, of those very particular reflections." Celadon, "like green clouds caught in a swirl of fine ice," "non-color," "the secret color," or even "the praise of blandness," developed in China since the 15th century BCE, takes its name from the shepherd Celadon, hero of Honoré d'Urfé's novel L'Astrée. In mid-17th-century France, celadon referred to a fabric color, a green tending toward white. Later, by analogy, this name was given to ceramics. "Working with emptiness. Making matter emerge from emptiness." Celadon is expressed in its quintessence: a trace of light in space, encircling "the form of emptiness." Like a radiant skin enveloping an absent body. Achieving the delicacy of this hollowed-out form, this satin-like quality of celadon, belongs to a quest for the absolute. Marielle Ernould-Gandouet, art historian. Journal of the Society of Friends of the National Ceramics Museum, September 2008