MANUFACTURE DE SEVRES

Mousse de Sèvres

José Levy in Sèvres

Challenges are a tradition at the Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres and often offer the opportunity to push the limits; inviting an artist as difficult to categorize as José Lévy provided yet another new challenge.
A polymorphous, facetious, self-confidence,ever inventive and, above all, inquisitive creator, this designer quite literally threw himself into the past, the history, the archives, the daily life, the techniques of Sèvres on the look-out for everything which could, in his eyes, create, maintain and give life to this establishment which appears to have greatly inspired him. José Lévy set up his base at the Manufacture, specifically in the molding-repair workshop, which he made his home for one summer and, like an infiltrator, added his imagination, his own personal vision,to a highly unusual procedure at Sèvres.
With subtlety, a touch of humor and a charming smile, José Lévy created three families of 34 unique sculptures: vases, plates and stones. The so-called Mousse de Sèvres, sensually silky white porcelain biscuit sculptures, join the almost three-hundred-year tradition of the Biscuit de Sèvres, in an abundantly decorative approach unique to this artist’s own personal world. José Lévy is not interested in titles and enjoys playing with them in order to surprise: designer, stylist, creator, fashion designer, artistic director, artist, who is he really, if not a free spirit guided by his sensitivity, his intuition and his emotions, attentive to the human dimension of all his methods, his research and his projects. In the same way as an orchestra conductor, he was able to inject a creative dynamic among the molders- repairers, who are more accustomed to reproducing
as closely as possible the sculptures in our repertoire than interpreting them. He pushed them—each in his own field—to create with him these microcosms in which we find shapes and figures that appear to have grown beneath the plates, in the vases, around the stones, like objects found buried after an earthquake or like eyewitnesses to legends in the process of invention, of stories being told. They have a strong decorative, delicate and fragile character. The process has also provided an opportunity to observe the great technical skill, and I would like to congratulate all the workshops that took part in this incredible adventure. Thanks go to José Lévy for the jubilation, energy and enthusiasm, and the latitude he gave them in this project, which required a high level of dexterity, as well as for this new collection of sculptures which arrives, at the right time, to enrich the historical repertoire of the Manufacture de Sèvres, like short stories inserted between the pages of the overall narrative.