Retrospective exhibition at the Adrien Dubouché National Museum
NON SANS RAISON PORCELAINE DE LIMOGES
Avant, Ici, Maintenant, L'expérience Non Sans Raison
The exhibition was presented on nearly 400 m² at the Adrien Dubouché National Museum from June 20 to October 19, 2015. Founded in 2008 by Martial Dumas and Bertille Carpentier, Non Sans Raison has become in the space of a few years only an important and singular actor in the Limoges porcelain landscape. Both creator and publisher, Non Sans Raison takes a fresh look at the tableware and the way to live an art industry born ago 250 years old. Through its creations and collaborations with designers, artists or manufactures, this young company combines a contemporary writing with ancestral know-how put at the service of high quality production. While maintaining a scrupulous respect for traditional techniques, Non Sans Raison incorporates innovative working methods and tools into its production, seeking to renew beyond porcelain itself, the way of practicing it in the 21st century. Confronting tradition with today's social and gastronomic uses, their objects echo an art of living in transformation. Non Sans Raison sees porcelain as a starting point towards an experience that sometimes escapes from the table. It emerges from porcelain Non Sans Raison a rich aesthetic universe that finds its sources in yesterday's visual arts, today's pop culture and design forward-looking tomorrow. This richness is evoked through a scenography that combines the creations of Non Sans Reason with others contemporary works: painting, photography, videos. The identity of this publishing house thus circulates through time, and seeks like many young artists and designers of his generation, to build a bridge between past and present, between know-how and creation. Since its founding, the Adrien Dubouché National Museum has become not only an important conservatory of the world's ceramics whole, but also an attentive observatory of Limoges's new porcelain creations. Pursuing this desire to be an actor of the debate, to maintain a close relationship with the creators and to take a critical look at the current affairs of this art industry, the museum chose to invite No Without Reason into its walls. The pieces and the approach of this company are presented through three thematic sequences, each allowing to understand concretely the journey through time around which one's identity is built. This exhibition also addresses certain technical, sociological and aesthetic issues that animate or even disrupt the creation of porcelain of our time. Because it traces the path of Non Sans Raison since its beginnings while proposing a reflection on what porcelain of the future could be, this exhibition is as retrospective as it is forward-looking. On the occasion of this exhibition, a book was published by Les Ardents Editeurs. Available for sale on the website of Non Sans Reason.
