Between homage, transmission, and abstraction, the vase becomes a visual language with infinite possibilities. With the works of Maison Matisse, Walter Usai, and Alice Gavalet, the vase transcends its utilitarian function to become a surface of expression, a trace of memory, or a visual experiment. Each approach reveals a unique way of engaging with matter, history, and gesture.
Maison Matisse, colour as heritage
Founded in 2019 by Jean-Matthieu Matisse, Maison Matisse celebrates the legacy of painter Henri Matisse by inviting designers to perpetuate his pictorial universe, interpreting it in the form of art objects. The vase becomes a canvas, a canvas for intense patterns and colors. Jaime Hayon draws inspiration from the Mediterranean to create joyful volumes fired up to seven times. Alessandro Mendini, for his part, is inspired by the purity of lines and transposes Matisse's abstraction into sensual forms, requiring up to eight firings. The Bouroullec brothers combine brick, metal, and earthenware to create landscapes of light. This diversity of techniques highlights refined craftsmanship, at the crossroads of ceramic tradition and contemporary design.
The pieces are currently on display at the Negropontes Gallery in Paris until September 10, and will then be presented at the Gallery in Venice until November 22.
negropontes-galerie.com/actualites/magie-du-trait-magie-des-couleurs
Walter Usai Ceramics, with hands in the clay
In contrast to Maison Matisse's editorial and collaborative approach, Walter Usai carries on a family tradition rooted in Sardinian soil for five generations. In Assemini, a small Sardinian village, each vase tells the epic story of a craft passed down from father to son. The creation of these pieces demands an intimate understanding of the material and constant adaptation to the vagaries of the climate. Walter Usai reproduces traditional models such as jugs, jars, and pots, while renewing their lines to suit a contemporary aesthetic. His work combines respect for the past with an openness to innovation, often in collaboration with other artists. Here, the vase remains an everyday object, but one sublimated by history and the artisan's hand.
Alice Gavalet, ornament as structure
For Alice Gavalet, a graduate of the École des Arts Décoratifs, the vase is no longer a container but a sculpture, a formal construction born from drawing. In her exhibition "Plates Formes" (Platform Forms), the artist overturns traditional hierarchies. It is no longer the form that precedes the decoration, but the motif that generates the form. The interior of the vase becomes visible, the color resembles paint, and the enamel plays on layering. The subtle tones and the presence of black, created by the application of successive strata, lend her pieces an almost pictorial intensity. It is a work of visual artistry, as deliberate as it is instinctive, where each curve responds to a line, each surface becomes an experiment.
https://www.pron.fr/fr/artistes/artist2
While Maison Matisse offers an encounter between painting and design, Walter Usai conveys a living memory of the earth, and Alice Gavalet explores the vase as a visual language. All three demonstrate that contemporary ceramics is a hybrid territory where the object transcends its function to become a means of expression. Through their works, the vase tells the story of those who shape it as much as the history of the eras it traverses.
Each in their own way, these artists and workshops perpetuate the art of craftsmanship while offering it new perspectives. The vase, an age-old symbol, thus reveals itself to be more alive than ever.
