‘Jean-Pierre Viot's ceramics are not easily defined. His large, informal pieces are strange and intriguing. Abstract, they are also allusive and narrative (their titles point us in the direction of these little snippets of a story), but above all they offer a joyful and facetious reading of ceramics, which have long since been freed from all constraints, emancipated from the know-how of tableware, industry or even architectural sculpture, fields in which Jean-Pierre has extensive knowledge having worked in them for a long time (and in the case of the latter, still today).
These sculptures, which don't fit into any one category, bear witness to the constant temptation to go beyond the line, to go beyond the form, offering a constant tension between escape and retention, momentum and slackness (in which Maurice Frechuret recognised one of the forms of ‘softness’ characteristic of twentieth-century sculpture). A subtle interplay of energies emerges, linked not only to the ceramist's intimate knowledge of the material but also to the pleasure he derives from it, which is measured by the richness of the treatment of the surfaces, the scarifications, stamping, impressions and sensitive modelling that mark it, the muted chords of colour or the dazzling freshness of a red or yellow on a white background giving them a kind of unexpected twist.
This primitive feast that Jean-Pierre Viot plays out in the studio, only to offer it to us at the end, is a constant in his work, from the slightly jazzy earthenware of the late 50s that marked his beginnings, to the stoneware wall sculptures and fountains of the 70s, whose uneven surfaces rivalled the mineral, to the resolutely wild raku sculptures of the 90s. His ongoing commitment to transcending boundaries has enabled him to discover the infinite potential for metamorphosis that only clay, of all the material arts, possesses, as he has worked successively with all forms of ceramics - earthenware, stoneware, raku and porcelain. In this way, he has accompanied its evolution towards irreversible autonomy. It would be hard to distinguish one technique from another in his work. It escapes us.
Carole Andreani