"All stylistic and decorative thinking combines the 3 elements that Moholy-Nagy analysed in his classes at the Bauhaus: structure as the principle of composition of the material; texture or ‘surface that organically results from the structure’ and manner as the appearance and ‘sensitive result’ of the whole, intended to create an ‘optical musicality’.
Brigitte Pénicaud creates functional objects which, while expressive, are often essential elements of the art of the table, but created above all for the pleasure of the eye and the touch, and also for the pleasure of eating.
It turns by off-centreing the edge, unbalancing the volume in search of a dynamic. It accentuates hollows and bumps and widens the turning to the point of collapse.
She seeks to forget the constraints of the functional in order to find greater freedom. She likes things to move; her bowls, whether very small or very large, seem to dance; they are of a rare finesse, in stoneware or porcelain....
She biscuits them after playing with their shapes and coating them with engobes from Tournon or porcelain, with touches of pigments, oxides, ashes and chalk drawings, sometimes with copper red or black lining the inside. Since her stays in Mexico, very bright tones have appeared, while the exterior remains airy.
Brigitte Pénicaud's texture is always pictorial, both in terms of the surface of the coating and the brushstrokes applied to the surface.
There is a way of finding oneself, and a way of rejecting oneself outside the painting. Most often very clear, her decoration emerges from an osmosis between colour and material: no real floral motifs, no calligraphy, sometimes almost a petal placed like a butterfly, and if it is a flower or foliage, it will only be suggested.
With her light palette, Brigitte Pénicaud shows us both the effects of light on her large landscape dishes and floral variations, with a fine, translucent touch in the manner of a glaze.
She leaves large areas bare, allowing the white of her porcelain slip to be an expressive part of her decoration. She paints in long, curvilinear strokes and large patches of colour, playing with their dilution in a watercolour-like manner.
She doesn't use lines to determine contours; the lines of colour are themselves surfaces; the colour gives form at the same time as it makes gesture, but she has to wait for the fire to reveal and give life to her ashes and oxides.
Although Brigitte Pénicaud does not claim to be influenced by any particular artist, her pictorial style is close to abstract expressionism. However, you can't help thinking of the sensitivity of Cy Twombly, the energy of Willem de Kooning or the lyricism of Joan Mitchell in some of her work. But what sets her apart is probably her relationship with music and jazz, insofar as she never ceases to make formal and pictorial variations,
always the same and always different, which give us a sense of the vital energy that gives them birth, producing a rhythm that combines shapes and strokes of colour. We could describe this aesthetic as a singular production of line and rhythm.
His work, whatever its size, strives to arouse in the amateur viewer affects that are destabilising in relation to the usual way of seeing. It gives us access to a free space, open to our own mental projections, and seems to achieve what we call a musical pictoriality.
Françoise de L'Epine, Paris, 10 April 2008