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Jean Derval (1925-2010) is a major figure in contemporary ceramics. After training in the advertising section at the École nationale des arts appliqués à l'industrie, where he was a classmate of Robert Picault and Roger Capron, he trained in the profession of graphic designer, and it was as a poster artist that he began his professional life. Hired by Christofle, he created goldsmiths' decorations but also a line of utility pieces made in Saint-Amand-en-Puisaye. This sandstone sanctuary, magnified by John Carriès and his school at the dawn of the 20th century, was a revelation for Jean Derval. In the Maubrou-Pigaglio workshop he discovered a universe which fully satisfies him through the richness of his techniques and his vast artistic possibilities. Even more, ceramics leaves the creator completely free to choose, with an almost magical immediacy of realization. He can "draw a bowl and drink from it the next day.”
In 1947, in Vallauris, Jean Derval found the two other members of the club “the three roosters": Robert Picault and Roger Capron, with whom he founded the Callis workshop. Two years later he joined the famous Madoura workshop, led by Suzanne Ramié and then dominated by the masterful figure of Picasso. In 1951, he founded the workshop Portal. There he developed a subtle art of great virtuosity, technical and artistic, dedicated to unique pieces. This expertise fascinated Roger Capron, who called on him from 1967 to 1973, notably for the major construction site of the Byblos hotel in Saint Tropez. Subsequently Jean Derval would be brought to collaborate in architectural achievements as prestigious as the airport of Saint-Denis de La Réunion or the Sophia-Antipolis technology park.
With a foreword and afterword by his friends Claude Bleynie and Jean-Paul van Lith, this book retraces the main stages of an expressive, diversified and very learned body of work where copper red reigns in majesty in a world devoted to earthenware, a true tour de force. His inspiration, strongly marked by the movement of imagery, is anchored in a tradition which allows it, in an often neocubist mode, to give us warriors, falconers from the Middle Ages, minotaurs and sphinxes, inherited from Mediterranean mythologies; a production of sacred art linked to an unshakeable faith.
This inspiration, reinforced by the multiple areas covered by Jean Derval, finds its unity in the rigor of the drawings, the concern for detail, a perfect knowledge of techniques and above all a constant attention to man and his multiple questions.
• Size: 30.5 x 23 cm
• 192 pages
• 300 Illustrations color and black & white
• Blanket bound under dust jacket
• ISBN: 978-2-9155-4240-0
Text in French only