Sarreguemines: Concours International de Céramique Sarreguemines 2002

Portrait

Two months before a major exhibition, and though some pieces are far from being finished, some not even wheeled, which would worry the common run of people, Jean Girel takes time to walk around his garden [...]

We taste tiny, lovingly grown tomatoes. [...] Again we go past piles of smal bowls, some trys, dropped there amidst the passage, to be seen inconsciously, with unobstructed view on a huge green and yellow courgette, laying on a stone.

All this is an integral part of this ceramist’s work. For him, nature is the absolute master and passionate observation of its phenomenons is the lead of his whole creation. One day he found a blackbird nest with two turquoise, orphan eggs. This morning gift inspired the Eggs series. Likewise, the two-coloured courgette, which will become a piece of porcelain, works quietly inside the designer.

Jean Girel wants to reflect nature from inside. He wants to make one with her through clay and enamel, nuptials in form of poetic equivalence.

He explores with the same passion, mineral, vegetal and animal worlds, juggles between cosmic time and the time of a dragonfly, involving his man’s life in-between; he invites rock and volcano in his oven for a nightlong, offers the coming millennium a rabbit fur, which will become shard in a thousand years and still remain rabbit fur.

[…] The bowl formed by two clasped hands, stands for the universal receptacle. Closed, it gathers and protects. Open, it gives back. For Jean Girel this sense is as well literal as figurative. In a library, the number of books, despite his restrictive form, allows to grasp the whole knowledge of mankind through ages and civilisations. Likewise, these wheeled shapes, result of more than forty years of observation, reflection, intuitive trials and errors, experiences, know-how, boldness, and, being constantly called into question, are a personal and poetic encyclopedia of nature’s phenomenons.

To watch with a fingertip, to caress with the eye, here, you can see daybreak and marshes, a lizard and stone, the glowing of night, the Milky Way and dust from the big bang. You may hear volcanoes ripping, the song of the stars and the backwash of a wawe. In the sound of porcelain, the pink spiral of the shell is telling the sea’s secrets.

In every single one of these glazed pieces, you may deposit thousands of little things, just for pleasure : fresh verbena leaves, a butterfly’s wing, a stone, a beetle, a bit of rain, a sunny spell. Everything suits them. It’s beautiful like moonshine on the water, tepid lava, the age of a tortoise, a polished stone, which allows to talk to gods.

As a Master of Art, entrusted to transmit his know-how, he is even more concerned about transmitting a state of mind. Of course, this means to wheel, to glaze, to fire, but above all, to observe, to test, to dare. He is the only one who opens his oven during a firing, the only one to install a drip to taunt Lucifer. He pushes pottery art, far behind decent limits.

He invents, transmutes, changes, shortens geological time in a lightning, adorns passing things with eternity, like an alchemist in his laboratory. In his workroom, filled with hundreds of magical mixtures, some of which, in case of success, having only been used once, he is already thinking of other trails, for instance : how to obtain this fine, dark crimson and so extraordinary skin of the aubergine ?

Martine Gayot
critique d'Art