RENEW

A fire recently completely destroyed David Louveau's workshop and wood- fired kiln. David Louveau's ceramics had, until then, embodied an earthly spirit, a shaping force of the earth and glazes that presented the spectacle of nature captured in its power of emergence, of subterranean emergence whose earthly origin seemed delicately gathered in the peaceful presence of a bowl, a cup, a vase, imbued with blue and maritime hues. The shards of the glazed surface covered everything with a harmonious softness and opened up to horizons of overseas origins of the artist, from Guadeloupe to New Caledonia, as well as the snowy landscapes of Canada where he continued his pottery training with his master Kinya Ishikawa. Like a frosty mantle of serenity, a pacified universe, after the genetic tumult of materials and elements subjected to creative mutation. It was a material and human disaster, the astonishment of devastation, where a man had managed to build his haven of peace, withdrawn in the Swedish countryside, in one of those houses with red cladding that so captivate tourists, facing a small lake with a dreamy pontoon, and which implies sometimes harsh and rustic living conditions. The early morning wake-up, the inauguration by the benevolent tea that David Louveau enjoys as a master, and the tirelessly continued work fueled by the passion that led him from Canada to this chosen home where he lives alongside Anna Johansson, another artist reviving the ancestral practice of weaving, born nearby, and from which most weaving techniques used in the rest of the world originate. This fire could have been fatal when the artist discovered, transformed into a field of ruins, the landscape of his days of work always renewed and of passion always rekindled, in the effort to seek and do better. Yet, this internal explosion that could have annihilated him was extinguished by unloading what the fire had not reached: the wonder of discovering intact pieces, whose success suggested the culmination of a long period of companionship with the work of stoneware. In this unexpected dazzle, he found, with incredible psychological and moral determination, the energy to turn the trial that could have been devastating into an opportunity for a gently emerging renewal. In this moment of grace and salvation, he perceived the invitation to return to the traces of his initial training, the favorable opportunity for a conversion and a return to his original ceramic loves. He made this aberration of scorched perimeter the blank page of a new era in his work, the beginning of a "second navigation," as Plato wrote, a departure otherwise defined from the "tabula rasa" spoken of by Descartes, when you start everything again, after eliminating everything that could shake the truth of reasoning, beliefs, and opinions. Starting from scratch to move towards something that could emerge in liberated truth, anchoring his new life in better harmony with the re-tuned interiority, according to the self he seeks the closest proximity to, through his works and their different eras. While he had found in stoneware his preferred material, which he could handle with the ease of years of experience and mastered art, he became aware of its lesser sensibility compared to what the work of porcelain brought forth in him, especially in the practice of Japanese white porcelain, Hakuji, a high-quality white stone clay discovered long ago in the Izumi mountains by the Korean potter Sampei, and of which he had undergone patient training with his master Kinya Ishikawa in Canada. In this almost immaculate white porcelain, devoid of patterns and hints of foreign colors, he found the opportunity for a rebirth, a return to himself, to what he calls his feminine part, the taste for sweetness, sensuality that is that of a listened sensibility, emotions whitened by purity and free expression, an eroticism that is that of the material delicately shaped. A virginity of material for a creative space restored to its original virtue, to the virginity of an aesthetic innocence, which is not the absence of artistic knowledge. This change of direction, this turn in his production, may be the chances of a more favorable fate, more in line with David Louveau's strongest aspirations, those that he may have needed to reach through what Henri Thomas so aptly called "a detour through life" in his eponymous novel: a long walk, a beat through the spaces and times of a long journey to end up on the shores of a Breton sea, and discover in the foam lapping at his feet this marine orange with a iodized flavor, which carries all the elements of the world and offers him the invention of his life: the idea that pulls him out of the dead, the undead he means, those who live every day without really knowing what they are doing or why. He discovered in this small nature filled with ancestral life, the symbol of what unites us to the world if we want it, as David Louveau is reconnecting with his deepest and most sincere universe: that of the purity of white porcelain, whose apparent nudity, essential stripping, reveals the part of silence that can make the highest notes of life heard in what is beneficial and sacred when it is respected. And because David Louveau holds the beginnings of his art from Japanese and Korean masters, it is striking to compare the proverb that a Korean friend confided to him: "after the fire comes fortune," with this masterful novel recently published by Akira Mizubayashi, "Suite inoubliable," from Éditions Gallimard, where the horrors of war in Japan could not hinder the transmission of declarations of feelings, fidelity, discoveries of filial bonds, because everything passed through the prism of the pure love of high art music, the notes it raises to an ethereal region, above the clouds that darken the blurred world of men and their obscure history. A bit of whiteness to live better, according to this purity that the art of ceramics knows how to entrust to the gaze and sensibility. This, David Louveau knows how to do, and in this second life of his art, one can expect to experience it even more strongly. After the volcanic, a certain violence of stoneware work, the time may have come, tragically experienced, but overcome by an announcing dazzle, for the fading towards the sensibility of whiteness and towards fully liberated emotion, the one that saves.