Since moving to Los Angeles in 2016, French artist and designer Olivia Cognet has made ceramics the fertile ground from which to express her boundless creativity. Allowing herself to explore all typologies and scales with the material, she creates monumental bas-reliefs, giant totems, as well as chairs, tables, lamps or vases.
So many unique pieces united by the same aesthetic rigor, abstract and graphic, all created by the artist in her studio freehand. Against the backdrop of the play of light and shadow of the California landscape, its modernist architecture and its intense nature, from which she draws her inspiration. Reactivating with modernity the great tradition of decorative arts, her works impose their functionality as much as their dreamlike power in space.
Olivia Cognet grew up in Nice on the French Riviera, trained at the Villa Arson, and was inspired by the great masters of the Vallauris school, from Picasso to Roger Capron. She first gives life to her ideas in flat form, through drawing, before taking hold of sandstone, a local clay that she uses in three natural shades. Her creations cultivate the strength of contrasts; her geometric and minimal lines dialogue with a more sensual and organic vocabulary. The austere aesthetics of the raw clay is combined with the finesse of the enamels that emerge in cracks, sources of singular evocations. Elsewhere, aerial excrescences defy the laws of weightlessness. Guided by her intuition, Olivia Cognet reinvents, day after day, the poetic experience of the birth of a work sculpted in the purity of the material. With the magic of the hand as an indelible imprint and the promise of a living beauty at the service of everyday life.