Glazed ceramic coffee table by Jean-Pierre Viot.
Base composed of four ceramic feet.
Artist signature under the base. 2026.
H : 15.3 x 26.9 x 67.3 inches.
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“Discreet, friendly, attentive, Jean-Pierre Viot is a central figure in French ceramics. (…) Jean-Pierre Viot’s work can be summed up in two words: rigor in construction, but sensitivity in form and material. While the former lends itself to the obviousness of abstraction, the latter is supposed to turn its back on it. An old debate, an apparent contradiction, an eternal struggle between the classical and the romantic: those convinced that rigor gives rise to a purer emotion, and those who believe that Dionysian intoxication—or simply a Zen respect for nature—offers a far more authentic voice.
Jean-Pierre Viot strives to resolve this opposition, to propose a synthesis, and shows us—if not proves—that it is possible. I imagine that his engagement with clay, the discovery of the material itself—the potter’s earth that undergoes so many metamorphoses, from the living walls of the quarry to the certainties of essential pottery shaped on the wheel and fixed by fire—has guided his approach. In his earliest works, he was confronted with architecture, and his choice was to endow it with the hypersensitivity of clay, as if left to its own devices. His walls, fountains, and sculptures might have seemed, had technique allowed it, to emerge directly from the ground, merely eroded by rain and sun. Yet beneath this gestural freedom, construction—however natural it appeared—was always present. (…) Jean-Pierre Viot is clear-sighted, and only great mastery can justify such ambition. He plays this subtle game of the constructed deconstructed, suggesting rather than asserting; his works strive to elude blunt references. (…) We find ourselves before objects that have, in a sense, returned to a state of nature, which, beyond their solidity, their construction, their architecture, invite the viewer to formulate a personal response, to take part in the dialogue proposed.
Jean-Pierre Viot, as comfortable with small-scale works as with large ones, knows how to enrich them with graphic marks, signs, scratches, sudden thicknesses of glaze that emphasize their underlying organic character. As Haguiko notes, beyond the object itself, he works on a subject that is none other than the space generated by it—much like a musician who is aware of the volume in which the fluid sonorities he has brought into being will unfold. (…) Jean-Pierre Viot’s work evokes a hard-won serenity.”
— Robert Deblander