Offered by Galerie Latham
Jacques Pouchain (1927-2015) is well known and appreciated in France for his work as a sculptor-ceramist, but he is also a painter, his first vocation for which he trained in Paris, at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière, after studies in architecture. He settled in Drôme in 1951 and became responsible for the Coursange earthenware factory in Poët-Laval. Then he created his own workshop in a small nearby town, Dieulefit, developing two types of production: utilitarian pottery and more artistic sculptural ceramics. “The Dieulefit workshop” was active from 1959 to 1982. Pouchain participated in numerous exhibitions, in France and abroad, including the important International Exhibition of Contemporary Ceramics at the Cantini Museum in Marseille, in 1965. He was also presented in the inaugural exhibition of the Vallauris Biennale in 1968. In the 1990s, he was behind the creation of La Maison de la Terre, a professionally approved exhibition and training space. In 2018, a retrospective exhibition was dedicated to him at the Poët-Laval Art Center. His works are present in several French museums such as the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, the Mobilier National, the museums of Marseille, Valence, Montreal (Canada) and Boston University (USA).
This “Rooster” is particularly interesting because of its zoomorphic stylization, very typical of French productions from the 50s and 60s. The formal design is daring in its affirmation of the use of the potter's wheel at the service of a sculptural intention. Different geometric shapes are very precisely assembled - a conical shaped bottle to make the stylized body of the gallinaceous, two half-spheres to make its folded wings - then small modeled and pelletized elements are added on the top of the volume, to make the beak and eye, the neck of the bottle thus becoming the cock's comb. On its wings, holes are made to allow the sculpture to eventually become a flower stand. Experimental form therefore, designed for a possible function, but become allusive... The greatest success for Jacques Pouchain, "new potter" in the heart of the 1950s, who strove to elevate his art towards experimental research, by working towards a certain rereading of the vernacular forms of the French ceramic tradition, in the lineage of other famous figures, that for example of Jean Beyer (in the 1930s, in Strasbourg) or André Rosay (in the 1940s/1950s in La Borne), who were the great precursors of animal art combining pottery and modernism.
