Jacques Monneraud builds his ceramic practice around a deceptively simple visual contradiction: objects that appear temporary, lightweight, and easily damaged are actually made from fired clay. His vessels reproduce the appearance of corrugated cardboard, folded edges, rough cuts, and strips of transparent tape with remarkable precision, turning an everyday packaging material into something unexpectedly durable. The effect depends on the tension between what the surface seems to promise and what the material actually is, transforming familiar domestic forms into exercises in perception and material deception.
The technical process behind this illusion is particularly meticulous. Monneraud combines three types of clay and throws the principal forms on a potter’s wheel before refining their contours once the clay reaches a leather-hard state. He creates the characteristic corrugated texture by pressing a handmade wooden tool repeatedly into the surface, while carefully shaped edges and subtle glaze applications reproduce the appearance of cut cardboard and adhesive tape. Despite their fragile appearance, the finished vessels are completely watertight, making their apparent vulnerability a carefully constructed visual fiction rather than a functional limitation.
This interest in material contradiction also connects Monneraud’s work to questions of durability and consumption. His choice of cardboard is significant precisely because the material is associated with packaging, disposability, and short-term use, while ceramics can survive for extraordinarily long periods. The contrast gives his objects a quiet critical dimension: something designed to look disposable is transformed into an enduring artifact. His previous career in advertising and creative direction also provides an interesting context for this shift toward slow, hands-on production, after he left advertising in 2021 to pursue ceramics more fully.
More recently, Monneraud has extended this material language into carefully arranged ceramic still lifes influenced by the restrained compositions of Giorgio Morandi. Rather than reproducing painted still lifes literally, he translates their attention to volume, alignment, light, shadow, and relationships between vessels into three-dimensional objects. The result is a practice where craft, illusion, and art-historical references converge, while the humble appearance of cardboard remains central to the visual tension.
More info: Instagram.
