Plates and Platters by Jean-Nicolas Gérard | GOLDMARK

Our Jean-Nicolas Gérard exhibition has got off to a fantastic start. There's a really healthy number of red dots on the price list over there. I thought I'd take this opportunity while these beautiful large square platters are up on the wall, and there are some slightly smaller sizes dotted around this exhibition too, to really highlight this aspect of Gérard's work. These large square dishes that we're looking at are sort of multifunctional. These are pieces that we often take down and we can share large kind of communal platters with, but up on the wall they have this wonderful presence. It's sort of halfway between a kind of sculptural form that's casting shadows, that has this wonderful outline to it, but it also has the kind of the draw, the kind of presence of an abstract painting. It's interesting that when you watch Gérard decorating one of these platters, pouring slip over it, dragging his fingers through or dabbing them with slip over the surface, scratching through the surface, sometimes with very rudimentary tools, even just like a little teaspoon, he looks a little bit like an American abstract expressionist painter attacking a canvas. And there is an element of action painting and colour field painting to these works. They have a similar kind of magnetism about them. In a way, they're more literal field paintings. There is a wonderful evocation of the plateau surrounding Val-en-Sole, the little town where Jean-Nicolas works. This area of France, very deep south of Provence, is a huge plateau that is littered with field after field of lavender, of vineyards. And so these kind of repeated colours and patterns, the patterns of lines of plants growing, of the sort of very deep, rich red soil, are always evident in Jean-Nicolas' work. Val-en-Sole itself leans literally the valley of the sun. It's a place where, for I think nearly 300 days throughout the year, there is beautiful direct sunlight. Something of that wonderful light is captured in these platters. They kind of hum with that kind of yellow warmth of the sun. There are also, I think, elements of Jean-Nicolas' own artistic influences on display in these platters. He's talked about how interested he is in traditional Asian calligraphy, Chinese calligraphy, Japanese calligraphy, the idea of the kind of very gestural, controlled brushstroke. I think in the drawing, in a platter like this, where you have this almost like a leaf design, a leaf motif, there is an element of Matisse in that idea of really quick, loose, free, almost naive drawing through the surface of the slip, as many of the French modern masters would on a page. Most of all, though, I think they capture the kind of the joy and the freedom that Girard finds in making pots like these. And that's something that he can't help but have then expressed out of the work. It's something that kind of captures you. You walk past these platters. Some beautiful, smaller examples with rich colours across them. You can't help but smile when you see them on the wall. So I invite you to try and take one of these home and see what it does for you. See how it serves not just for food, for pleasure amongst guests, for laying out a dinner service, but also for the wonderful shapes, colours, textures, the contrasts of light and dark that it gives, just as any abstract painting would.