Fouilhoux

The unctuous sheen

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Historic celadon reached its height in China under the Southern Song. It is a glaze, a covering, with the ability to melt slowly and keep its thickness without running too quickly.

This quality was developed by Chinese potters because it reproduces the visual sensations of the archaic jades they admired: translucency and an unctuous sheen. A great thickness is the condition for translucency, for that inner light; and the unctuous sheen is just as essential.

A matte, opaque reflection impoverishes the reading of a sculpture, and a mirror-bright one cancels it out, because it reflects the images of its surroundings. The unctuous gloss, by contrast — the Chinese compared it to congealed mutton fat — gives a particularly strong presence, close to the archaic jades they admired, because it carries little or no reflection of the surrounding images that would destroy the integrity of the volume. In the West, sculptors' interest in marble and its marmoreal sheen is not unrelated.

It is this celadon — that of the Imperial Chinese wares of the Southern Song, the Guan and their Longquan copies — that reproduced the sensations of jade with its unctuous sheen; it is they who made celadon legendary. The green colour, due to a small amount of iron oxide in a glaze fired above 1200 degrees in a kiln where the air supply is reduced, is a natural phenomenon; it does not resemble the ancient jades — the colour alone is there.

To unite translucency and the unctuous sheen is to seek a philosopher's stone…

It is this celadon that nourished my work as a sculptor. Since I discovered it at the Musée Guimet, I have devoted myself to this technique, which I had to rediscover alone, through endlessly renewed research, using the minerals specific to my own geography, different from those of my historical predecessors. It took me years to find the technical principles that govern the formation of celadon's unctuous sheen. Today, after all these years devoted to this spellbinding and mythical material, I still sometimes spend hours at my scales, weighing out trials to perfect the quality of a sheen, a translucency, or the nuance of a particular colour.

What characterises celadon is that it resembles a stone — a translucent pebble that captures the light and glows, letting it flow gently across its surface, catching waxy, unctuous reflections on the curves and roughness of its reliefs.

It was by looking at the dragons modelled on Song vases that I understood the potential for beauty and the plastic language of celadon. From then on my desire was absolute: to master this technique and bring it into my work as a contemporary ceramic sculptor.

This plastic language rests on the multiplicity of reflections across the reliefs, on an impression of infinite depth, of lightness, of the impalpable in the material — but also on the harshness of the sharp edges the glaze does not cover, which, left bare, appear as a lighter, sometimes orange, line that underlines and orders the magmatic forms of the celadon.

Celadon gives a sensation of smoothness; it is at once discreet and soft, yet of great hypnotic force. This impression of serenity allows, by contrast, for complex, vivid, tormented forms. All my work is structured by oppositions, by disparities that create tension.

First, the rough form is cut from a block of fairly soft clay. The shapes that emerge are dynamic, abundant, nervous, magmatic; they stretch with the swift gesture that creates them. On their surface they keep the traces, the dross, the scales of their birth. For me these forms belong to the underground, the passionate, to feeling, to the spontaneous; it is matter torn away, separated, becoming individual. They must be barely organised, little defined, little finished. This rough state is sacred — it is the trace, the imprint of a moment of life, and I preserve it.

Freeing it from the mass of clay unfolds over a longer time. The clay has become firm, and the lines then turn geometric, the surfaces smooth, the lines taut. I hollow out and I order. For me this belongs to the realm of ideas, of reflection, of thought; it must stand against the sensual forms of the rough state. The dissimilarity of finished / unfinished found in many painters and sculptors, such as Michelangelo, strongly appeals to me. That moment when, partially, the rock becomes a slave emerging from the matter…

I like a work to take on meaning while at the same time remaining matter — for the artist not to appropriate the whole of the material, but to sing in duet with it.

Fouilhoux — May 2026