From her training as a stained-glass artist, Odile Levigoureux has retained a deep affinity for color. After experimenting with a wide range of mediums — including tapestry, felt, and paper — she has spent the past twenty years masterfully exploring ceramics. Now focusing on still life, particularly that of the Dutch Golden Age, she has developed an extraordinary palette of glazes worthy of the great Flemish painters.
It was at the turn of the 2000s that Odile Levigoureux first approached clay and modeling. Her earliest faces then appeared, forming choirs — crowds of figures populating what she calls her “imaginary theaters.” After settling in Haute-Normandy in 2006 and enrolling in organ and harpsichord classes at the conservatory in Dieppe, her altarpieces evolved into sculptures in the round and small architectural constructions, where domes crown swirling chaconnes [a dance in triple meter that emerged in 16th-century Spain, editor’s note], echoing the rhythms of Baroque music. At that time, her work was essentially white, shaped with porcelain slip and occasionally heightened with gold leaf. It was not until 2019 that the first enamel decorations appeared, alongside a new thematic focus on the vegetal world: bouquets and gardens with explosive forms and shimmering colors. During preparations for an exhibition project at the Musée de la Chartreuse, she became fascinated by still life to the point of making it her new Grail: “what is called in English ‘still life,’ the quintessential subject for contemplating everyday objects and the ordinary foods brought into the kitchen,” she explains. “Sixteenth-century paintings celebrate the warm interior of the home, but above all they are opportunities for impeccable compositions, perfectly balanced arrangements — a meditation on painting itself: forms, materials, light, colors, and so on. To achieve the same through ceramics, a meditation on sculpture, is what stimulates and drives me today!”
In these new compositions, Odile Levigoureux works with ceramics and enamel like a true painter, applying small touches of color with a brush, emphasizing every detail and revealing every volume, transforming each sculpture into a living picture. It is a double tribute to the Flemish painters she admires — Pieter Claesz and Willem Kalf — as well as to the Baroque spirit that runs throughout her work.
[Excerpts] Jean-Marc Dimanche, “The Enamel Painting of Odile Levigoureux,” Connaissance des Arts, Nov.–Dec. 2025.
