“Vivid impressions, blooming forms, emotions.” Ronan Bouroullec encapsulates his creative journey with these words, illustrating how his work evolves, diverges, and flourishes across various creative realms.

Ronan Bouroullec’s exhibition presented by Galerie kreo at rhinoceros gallery in Rome bears witness to this method founded on the simultaneity of his artistic practices, privileging sensory experience, intuition, and leaving room for improvisation. It brings together vases made in 2022 in Tajimi, Japan – the birthplace and center of Mino Yaki ceramics for over a millennium – but also a series of recent relief sculptures, a collection of previously unseen drawings, and design pieces deriving from the research Bouroullec undertook in his collection for the Saint-Michel de Brasparts Chapel in Brittany, never before exhibited.

It represents a moment of assembly of these propositions, inscribed in the contiguous fields of design, sculpture, and drawing, where osmosis can occur at their edges, at their limits. The vase as the thinnest boundary between plastic and functional dimensions, the statuses of sculpture and object. The relief as a space for hybridization of drawing and sculpture. The object that articulates the question of form and atmosphere. It reflects a period of life and work: a few months of 2022-2023 during which they are intimately contemporaneous.

What unites these narratives beyond chronology is also the notion of assembly, as Ronan Bouroullec stated: “If you take this vase, this table, I think the heart of my language lies in how they are assembled, in the way shapes, planes, and materials come together within them.”

It is the assembly of five forms combined in groups of two, three, four, or five, that gives rise to the Tajimi vases. The elements stem from a mechanical process of clay extrusion, reinforcing the sensation of their weight, density, and presence. This process also enables the enamel to adhere differently to angles and other surfaces. The result is a subtle contrast that affirms form, responding to the delicacy, mystery and charm of the tiny deformations that occur during firing. These tiny irregularities confer upon the assembly of geometric pieces an extreme delicacy.

The question of assembly is also central in the relief sculptures, too, determining the dynamic relationship between volume and plane, form, and decoration. While all motifs are executed in ceramic, originating from a free gesture, the backgrounds and frames offer two complementary, tensioned directions, between which a dialogue ensues. Some, in anodized aluminum, play on an almost synthetic halo effect; others, in pastels on wood – with a ceramic frame – respond in a tone of intimacy and depth.

Assemblage of materials, forged hammered steel, glass, and granite from Huelgoat for the candlesticks and tables, adhering to the principles that guided the project for the Breton chapel: the search for essential vocabulary reduction, balance between sensations of mass and lightness, and the vibration of things through surface treatment. Lastly, assembly of felt lines in the large drawings, whose almost total monochrome accentuates the perception of contact points, rhythmic pulsation, moments of sudden movement, and smooth transitions. What is revealed, with its gesturality, is the very time of drawing: a linear, continuous time, synchronous with the felt time, lived time, marked by immediacy, by the contemporaneity of gesture and result. The time of creation and the time of life, in harmony.

Martin Bethenod