Jean-Nicolas Gérard's 5th Major UK Exhibition Walkthrough | GOLDMARK

As I was walking around this exhibition earlier today looking at these beautiful pots by Jean-Nicolas Gérard, I picked up a copy of the exhibition catalogue and I noticed on the spine the number 73. That means that with the occasional show which didn't have an accompanying monograph we're probably up to about 80 exhibitions over the last 20 or so years which seems extraordinary in this little exhibition space here in Rotterdam. If you don't know of Jean-Nicolas Gérard, he is a French potter who works primarily in slipware. These pots are earthenware, they come from a very long tradition from the south of France of decorated pottery that has been brought entirely up to date to a kind of contemporary exuberance by Gérard. It's very difficult to talk about his work for these exhibition walkthroughs, not least because this will be our fifth exhibition of his pots. He is a potter who we all at the Gallery are intimately familiar with. I grew up as a child eating off, drinking from his pots, seeing his work all around our household and now my five children sit around a dinner table that is again full of his pots. Of all the potters we work with here at the Gallery, he is the one to whom we all turn I think when we're stocking our kitchen larders and it's often been said of his work that Jean-Nicolas is the potter's potter because so many of our great makers, so many of his contemporaries use and admire his work too. When I try to put into words exactly what it is about his work that is so sort of infectiously enthusiastic and welcoming to use, what it is that potters see in his work, it's very difficult to hone down exactly what it is that we're looking at and that's something that I've found Jean-Nicolas has as well when he's talking about his own work in his process. A number of years ago my wife and I were given the task of translating and transcribing a number of interviews with Jean-Nicolas that J.E. Goldmark here at the Gallery had filmed out in his studio in Valenceau, the south of France in Provence. Because of a quirk of the way the footage had been uploaded for us to work from, we could only see the lower left-hand corner of the frame and so in this beautiful, almost Caravaggesque, dark, dark contrast of shadow and light, not unlike the heatwave weather we're having at the moment, you could see Jean-Nicolas' hands just darting in and out of frame as they molded, as they put together parts, as they engineered collars, as they turned beakers on the wheel. It seemed almost like he was kind of shy and retiring into the work and that rather than his words, it was his hands that were doing the explaining for him. The phrase he's always used for what he does is, in French, l'intelligence des mains, so a kind of intelligence of the hands and I think that gets to the heart of what it is that Jean-Nicolas is always trying to do. Jean-Nicolas was born in Brazzaville in Congo at the very end of French colonial rule and when that ended his father, who worked as a geologist, brought the family back to France. So he grew up around Cannes and then Marseille. He discovered pottery almost by accident. He sort of stumbled into a workshop inspired by his sister who was working as a basket weaver and discovered a kind of love of clay and it was that discovery alongside meeting his tutor Jean Biagini which kind of introduced him to a very kind of zen-like working with clay. He started with a kind of production style throwing, so throwing the same kind of pot over and over again and he said he would throw, he would look at it, he would destroy the pot and then he would start again, repeating the same process over and over again to the point where he was no longer thinking about what he was doing but feeling what he was doing and I think that's where that phrase l'intelligence des mains comes from. When you look around the pots in this exhibition, no one piece is the same as the next. There is a kind of wonderful variety to the way that Jean-Nicolas decorates the surface of his pots, the way he's almost sort of dancing around them, making marks through the clay, through the slip layer above it, the way that he's dotting his finger and thumbprints on them, the way that he's dribbling the slip over, so that in his words, the decoration he's making is a kind of animation of the surface, that it's animating the three-dimensional body that's beneath it and really that gets down to the duality of the tradition that he's working in, terre vernisée. You've got le vernis, the slip, a kind of superficial decorative layer and then la terre, the clay underneath and it's interesting that Jean-Nicolas pots so sort of echo the actual clay, the actual soil around Valençol where he works, where there is an abundance of lavender fields, of vineyards, this beautiful crumbly deep kind of red-brown clay that's so often on show in his pots is a real kind of evocation of the landscape around him. It's often said of decoration and the decorative arts, particularly of the decorative traditions in this country, that they are a kind of reflection of our relationship with the landscape and with the seasons that attend it, the kind of foods that we eat, the plants we see growing around us, this sort of rural world with which for many many hundreds of years we were so intimately intertwined. I think Jean-Nicolas pots are the most sort of fabulous celebration of that. They are drawing on the kind of colours and the surfaces and the kind of freedom, the great kind of exuberant growth that you see in the natural world. All of that is contained in his pots and so there's an element of that that you feel when you see a dinner table laid out with his work, when you eat from his work, you feel in some way sort of closely connected to that act, to that kind of ritual of eating and the idea of the land where that food came from. It's not something intellectual in his work that attracts us, it's a real tactile intuitive feeling that sees so many of us who work here constantly going back to his pots to use in our own homes. I said at the start of this video that it's very hard to put into words what it is about Jean-Nicolas' work that is so irresistible, the kind of magic that it contains and so I thought rather than try and explain it to you I could show it to you. This is a pot, not from this exhibition, but that belongs to me. It's an everyday functional bowl, it's one of a series that I have at home and I don't know if you'll be able to see but all the way around the rim it is chipped and cracked, it's a bowl that has been loved and used, all of that loving abuse has smoothed its scars where you can now see the clay exposed. It's a very loose and free bowl, when I hold it in my hands I can feel the kind of that wonderful centrifugal motion of throwing on a wheel. It's not been thrown and turned to within an inch of its life, I can feel the movement in it. Actually when I hold it up it's not a perfect circle, it has these sort of almost these imperfect rounded corners to it and so in this very loose and lively and expressive bowl there's actually a kind of hidden utility. These short straight walls are perfect for my young children when they sit at a tabletop height they can see the food that's in their bowl and any overzealous shoveling of their cutlery doesn't knock them over. They've got a lovely kind of irregular surface to them that lets them clasp it in their hands and these corners mean that they stack and slot into one another quite nicely. But it's not a utilitarian thing about Jean-Nicolas Potts that draws us to them. There is a feeling that I get from this bowl that this is someone who, as difficult as he finds to explain what it is he's looking for in his process, in the way that he works, the way that he deconstructs, the way that he throws, coils, builds his pots up, that nonetheless this is someone who thinks and feels very deeply about what he's doing and all of that is somehow communicated back out of the pots. There are particular forms in this show that show off the way that Jean-Nicolas thinks very carefully about the way that his pots are built or come to life. There are numbers of beautifully kind of crude and quite rough collared vases where the body may have been thrown and then this large almost sort of comical lip has been added by hand, it's been coiled. There are little pinch pots that have been built not by throwing but by forming between the fingertips and they have this lovely kind of delicate sort of puckered quality to them. There is a wonderful almost kind of medieval whimsy to a lot of this work. It kind of reminds me of the the fanciful carvings you might see in an English church. Lidded jars with wonderful kind of bubble hat lids. Dishes that have little rabbits or abstract shapes running around the edges of them. The shapes of his wonderfully characterful teapots. These beautiful carafe-like bottles that can either hold flowers proud or conserve wine, water on a tabletop. Particularly spectacular are some of these really large square platters which have almost become a kind of canvas, an abstract kind of stage on which Jean-Nicolas has painted, scratched through, scored the surface, made these beautiful almost abstract works of art that can hang on the wall but then be brought off and laid out for a communal meal. But actually for all of the the kind of majestic colour and this decoration and gesture that you see on these pots around us, it's when holding a bowl like this that I feel really what Jean-Nicolas is doing all the time in his pots, no matter the form, no matter the shape and scale. He puts us in touch with the clay in a way that is very kind of profoundly intimate. It's a similar feeling to kind of running your fingers over the soil as you do when you're working in the garden, going out for a walk into the kind of countryside that is reflected in his work. And that's something that you see in Jean-Nicolas' life, the way that he tends to his own garden, the way that he serves food. All of that is contained and expressed as well in the way that he tends to shapes and offers up his clay. Ultimately these are pots that celebrate the most important things in our life, the way that we share meals with each other, the way that we interact with and live with the environment around us. And that's very hard to express in words, but you don't need words when you've got pots as beautiful and lively and unpretentious as these. I hope you've enjoyed this exhibition walkthrough of this fantastic new show by Jean-Nicolas Gerard. These pots will of course be available online and here in the gallery. I hope some of them can find their way into your home.