Gilbert Portanier

Monogrammed GP for Gilbert Portanier in Vallauris around 1960Height: 12cmDiameter: 15cmA micro chip on the edge (very minimal)Magnificent enameled blue color Gilbert Portanier studied secondary school on the French Riviera. Around the age of 17, he felt a taste for the arts growing within him. In 1945, he left for Paris to study architecture at the ENSBA. He quickly turned to painting and drawing, which he would soon study on his own. In 1948, after a stay in Brussels, he returned to the French Riviera where, during a visit to Vallauris, he discovered the world of ceramics and met Picasso. In 1949, he created, with his friends Albert Diato and Francine Del Pierre, a small workshop, which they called "Le Triptyque", where they began to teach themselves ceramics together. In 1954, he settled in a traditional pottery where he would have vast workshops, finding a mythical place of ceramics where all the possibilities of a still virgin art were offered to him. He learned the multiple techniques associated with it and created his own figurative, abstract, suggestive language, materialized by a versatile graphic design of great freedom. His color palette betrays by its richness and intensity the sensitivity of the painter. For Portanier, ceramics is a way of translating feelings, emotions, the pleasures of life. He is a colorist and a connoisseur of enamel, just as a virtuoso of drawing. In 2018, creation of the Gilbert Portanier Foundation located 8 Chemin des Potiers in Vallauris.