Jean Girel

Jean Girel | Céramiste | jeangirel.fr

Born in 1947. Lives and works in Saône-et-Loire. Jean Girel's turned, centered, classical forms are pure pretexts for enameling. From the outset, Jean Girel's admiration was for the Song of China in the 10th-13th centuries, for celadon, for the 'hare-fur' effect, for iridescence, and then for the buried secrets of Yohen* bowls. Jean Girel is an intellectual and dogged researcher, a demiurge driven by the need to understand and reproduce the alchemy of materials as they pass through the fire. He speaks of "ceramics of phenomena and interactions of phenomena". By this he means recreating, in the depths of the materials, the conditions for the emergence of expected effects. He has often taken nature as his subject of study. In this way, he has succeeded in bringing out of matter the soft, r osed carnation of shellfish, the shiny, mottled skin of a salamander, the dilated blisters of a toad... like so many sublime and necessary demonstrations. Today, Jean Girel allows himself more freedom. He breaks with any obligation of analogy and dares to be gratuitous in all its craziness and uninterpretability. He is developing a powerful, radically abstract aesthetic with pop overtones.

*Yohen, the universe in a bowlfilm by Yannick Coutheron with Jean Girel, 2018.