PRISES DE NOTES

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All Jeanne’s artistic and human experiences are
experiences of journeys,crossings and meetings,
which lay down the foundations of her personal
landscape. She is never afraid of embarking on
new and perilous techniques and mixes.
Her use of ceramics, which began in 2013 while she
was in residence at the Cité des Arts in Paris, has
become more and more necessary in her overall
project around the Landscape, its motifs, its visions
and its ramifications. Little by little, we start to see
dialogues and exuberant quasi-confrontations between
small water-colours or oils on paper and ceramics,
appearing in her installations. These are very new
concepts and situations.
Her bright dynamic gouaches supply us with the
patterns, the rhythm of jubilation and the spontaneity
of sketches. As for her ceramics or plaster sculptures,
they conjure up in a most sensual way, the concrete
elements of the landscape, between vegetable and
organic.
It was during her residence in Holland at the end of
2015 at the Sundaymorning EKWC (The European
Center of Ceramics) that the fusion occurred.
This residence toppled all her notions of time,
technique, environment and apprenhension ; but
never mind, because Jeanne so enjoyed the total
experience of this newly-acquired technique which
she took on board with greed and good humour.
At the end of 3 months of intense activity, she returned
to France and produced some of her most fascinating
installations or sets. Indeed, her ceramics / paintings
assemblages are really versatile and she’s never
afraid of using both the qualities and the faults
inherent to both media ; in fact she quite enjoys
doing so ! The result is flamboyant. We see one-off
pieces, multiple molds, transpositions from drawings,
enamelled inventions, false vessels, vegetable forms,
hybrid forms, sculptures... Vibrant and sensual
variations on the theme of Nature and Landscape.
Set on a speckled granit plinth, green pots, like
hollowed out trunks with pouring lips, stand erect
like some sort of wobbly forest alignement – they
are glossy and huddled together maybe to watch or
to grow ? The toneware cliff seems to incarnate the
very Earth, a geological slice, a compact and brute
force, where artist and matter come face to face.
The one-off modelled pieces with plantlike forms and
colours (plants and trees) are clearly organic with
uneven dips and bumps left on purpose by the artist’s
fingers and they are sensual and volumptuous, be they
covered in white, blue or pink opaque milky enamel.
Resemblance with anything real, either in shape or
pattern, is not the point. It’s the installations and
combinations of Jeanne’s ceramic pieces which show
us her multiple experiences (connected to real things)
and must be read as a whole landscape; each element,
fragment or group of items go to make up the whole.
We must acknowledge, in this process, the spirit
of the painter, the narrative effect, the decorative
flourishes, the focus on series, the risk-taking and
the transgression. In this elaborate and rich mix of
sculptures, objects, rhythm and tension, a structure
appears in a choreography which emphasizes the
complementarities and the oppositions. It’s a very
strong statement about both landscape and painting,
with references to Mondrian and
to « l’Origine du Monde ».