Experimental Ceramicist emmanuel boos Makes His U.S. Debut at New York Gallery Raisonné

An emmanuel boos coffee table or vase might seem orderly at first. Composed from repeated elements resembling the crystalline cubes and parallelepipeds often employed by the 20th-century Minimalist artists he’s long revered—Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Donald Judd—these just barely functional sculptures emerge uniform out of sheer luck, or so he claims. For the French ceramicist—the recipient of a 2024 Loewe Craft Prize Special Mention—working with his preferred “unpredictable” and self-deterministic porcelain is always a gamble but also a chance to guide, not dominate, its transformation; allowing it to speak for itself.

“When drying, it’s prone to cracks and firing it at high temperatures can cause it to warp and deform,” boos explains. “Glaze (the vitreous coating over the body) is equally unpredictable: its texture, shine, surface, and color are versatile. In spite of its solidity, fired porcelain remains fragile. And regardless of my experience, it’s still difficult to foresee where or what will go wrong. But it often does. I never try to contrive it to do something. At best, I’m trying to play with it and I can sometimes turn it into a form of precision and repetition.”

Somehow, this temperamentality is honed in, contained within rectilinear forms. And though these elements might seem radically idiosyncratic when presented standalone, their relatively modulated proportions allow them to play well together almost like puzzle piece tiles. “This is a game, implying I am not only marveling at it (I sure do) but that I’m an actor in the process as well,” he says.

This perceivable complexity is fully apparent in boos’ cumulative Modular series of one-off tables, stools, and other furnishings. Many of these iterative works are on view as part of his U.S. solo show. Opening today, the Noir C’est Noir exhibition at New York’s Raisonné gallery offers a comprehensive overview of his decades-long practice.

Also on view are his Vases, a series of “standalone” vessels in which porcelain truly acts on its own and becomes a boisterous protagonist in doing so. When fired in the kiln, these forms—originally scaled in the same uniform fashion as the other components mentioned before—crinkle and crumble under their own weight. “First firings were dramatic until I started to play with this very unpredictable behavior,” boos explains. “I fired the pieces close to one another and they would eventually kiss. Upon cooling, the glaze would hold them together, hence making them functional. But functionality remains ambiguous. It is this ambiguity that I am after. In it resides the diversity of ceramic practice between function and art.”

The ongoing Bricks series is similar. With these singular formations, cracks and bends might seem intentional but they’re also happy accidents. “At Sèvres, France’s national manufacture for porcelain, artisanal knowhow and excellence has been preserved since 1756 as an invaluable cultural heritage,” he says. “In spite of the centuries of experience found here with this medium, there is a famous saying firmly ingrained among its craftspeople porcelain lives.” By this they are referring to the unpredictability of the medium, as if the material was endowed with some willingness of its own.”

boos roots his near-fatalistic approach in the New Materialism philosophy, a school of thought refuting the notion that man has agency over material or that matter is inherently inert. He cites speculative realism (onticology) theorist Levi Bryant: “material objects and substances possess an active capacity to influence events, shape human actions, and produce effects independently of direct human intervention.”