CÉRAMIQUE FRICTION
“CÉRAMIQUE FRICTION”, XXIV ème BIENNALE INTERNATIONALE DE VALLAURIS 2012
Open space
Asked about their way of working with four hands, Baptiste Ymonet and Vincent Jousseaume, came up with all the scenarios: sometimes drawing is a point of departure (the ZAG carafe) but generally not; no computer-assisted design either; and few objects are really fixed before being produced. Their collaboration principally involves discussion and the setting up of systems giving them as much freedom as possible. “If we know exactly what we’re going to do, what’s the point of doing it?”(1) They both like serial work and the variations that can result from it; they like chance and the surprises and accidents generated by experimentation undertaken with a sense of urgency. This is an indication of their considerable confidence in their ability to achieve finished objects, as well as a certain radical way of thinking: a judicious object, whatever its level of experimental audacity and abstraction, can impose its functionality.
Another interesting position: the duo claims to love what is basic. A pot of flowers delights him, the decor in general leaves him indifferent. To reach the balance between the narrative and the geometrical abstracts that characterises them so well, they would concur with the motto ‘Less is more‘. But extracting the most from the least does not necessarily imply a wish to create minimalist working drawings. There again, there are no rules, but the desire to thoroughly explore all the versions of a form to bring out the whole poetic potential.
Éva Prouteau
Extract from the text ‘Céramique friction’ for the catalog of the international biennial of ceramics of Vallauris 2012
(1) Picasso, « Entretien avec Christian Zervos », in Cahiers d’Art, 1935.
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