​"Epures" Espace Sadika Gammarth (Tunisie) 2009

​

Hands knead a simple ball of earth, round as a small planet or a belly, and by this gesture primitive world gently, both intimate and cosmic, is created. For the earth, probably more than any other material, leads to the artist's works, a link between the most archaic of the deepest self and the vastness of the world. While the primitive fire was extinguished, but by cooking it will be recalled. And its complementary opposite, water, necessary to test the flexibility and softness of the forms is then drawn from the pelvis to slip. The air drying, so obvious to be forgotten, completes the square of the four primary elements laid down by ancient physics.

Forms proposed by Marie-José Armando, facilities the agency by which it, directly involved in what is now recognized as "contemporary art". In fact, the ceramic art probably the most archaic to the size of the stone age-no: styles, suspected membership of cultures and eras, mark a very relative time axis. When Marie-Jose Armando now makes raku bowls can be confused with a Japanese room of the seventeenth century as when an artist of Art Brut model a crude form of appearance is believed to recognize a piece of old some archaeological museum or when Picasso painted it resembles an owl in a disturbing, without knowing it, the painter of the Chauvet cave, 32,000 years before him. However the modern "contemporary" Marie-José Armando is immediately apparent in the sketch of his abstract forms that grow almost by themselves, in pure beauty, without apparent meaning or function intended, in an arrangement that fascinates to first before questioning. By seducing and impregnating our eyes our being by capturing an emotion without words, this aesthetic is certainly enough and is unlikely to be no need for further proof that the magic that capture intimate product. However, such forms do not reach this accuracy with a significant free chance, pure improvisation, but because they are irrigated, served from within.
Often contrasting matte black support, or for example a mass of fine needles tinted black with squid ink, and in themselves improbable technical prowess, the whiteness of parts devoid of enamel involved especially the aesthetics of the work. Some calling it an "oriental", thus referring to an aesthetic of the count, the void, "Zen" as it is sometimes to talk fast. Yet these pieces, driven by inspiration, fed for one, do not leave anything, do not fall under a vacuum to be sublimely revealed here would still be exempt from any direction. They fascinate because no one can say at the outset why and how they generate contradictory feelings of strangeness double sudden and intimate recognition. For the alphabet of shapes, potentially infinite, it is declining, Marie-Jose Armando (just to read some of his titles) feeds on a careful observation of natural forms. More than the aesthetics of stone on which the material would first think, is the order plant that inspires the artist mainly because in the path of creativity, these forms are made of a phase another phase, prior, and everything else inside contemplative, which fascinated his eye was first brewed the infinite wealth of forms of the plant world, the creative profusion of its formal inventions. In this capacity first glance above his gesture, we sense in a kind of mysticism Armando natural, ignoring science and a naturalistic, feeds a deep impregnation aesthetic eye fine detailing, down to the intimate secrets of a bark, a flower, a leaf, fruit, modular structures to collect the essential which is expressed by their originality. The works of Marie-Jose Armando are usually macroscopic development (obviously reinterpreted in favor of his plastic sense and sensitivity) forms of the plant world, but sometimes, as in its mineral stones strangely contacting them by movements of their highly polished edges.
Our excitement stems from the fact that, without immediate consciousness, our eye recognizes the basic geometries of the world we are, and disclosed by us to the universal is. And art and nature come together without imitating the eye communicates with the soul, and aesthetics, we approach a natural contemplation by bringing us to share the most intimate and most universal of ourselves .

​

Jean-Claude Villain

​

​