Jacques Monneraud’s Cardboard Mirage
There is a quiet reverence in Jacques Monneraud’s work, a paradox suspended between the ephemeral and the eternal. His ceramics—an exquisite contradiction—mimic the coarse, unassuming nature of corrugated cardboard yet are crafted with the permanence of fired stoneware. One could be fooled at first glance. A crumpled box, a makeshift vessel held together with what appears to be packaging tape, all seemingly discarded in a studio corner—until closer inspection reveals their impossible weight, their indestructible form.
Monneraud, a Paris-based artist, has an uncanny ability to distill the poetry of the everyday. His latest collection, aptly named Cardboard, is a meditation on the impermanence of objects, rendered with the meticulous attention of a sculptor devoted to deception. He coaxes ceramic into the language of imperfection—the folds, the fragile edges, the translucence of aged kraft paper, all faithfully reinterpreted in stoneware. The irony is delicious: these once disposable materials, condemned to disintegration, are now immortalized, their vulnerability frozen in time.
It is this balance between past lives and permanence that makes Monneraud’s work so compelling. His practice is rooted in a deep nostalgia for objects that bear the marks of use—boxes softened by handling, their creases and layers imbued with silent histories. “I’ve always been drawn to things that time deteriorates,” he says. “There’s something beautiful in their fragility, in their quiet disappearance.” This reverence for the overlooked, the discarded, transforms his ceramics into relics of the everyday, relics that could very well outlast us all.
The meticulousness of Monneraud’s process borders on alchemy. The illusion of cardboard is achieved through the blending of three distinct stonewares, each chosen for its ability to mimic the layers of pressed paper. The rough, fibrous surface, so eerily familiar, is sculpted by hand, then coaxed into a kiln where fire imbues it with an uncanny solidity. Even the glossy strips of what appear to be packing tape are painstakingly recreated with glaze—an experimental formula that took months to perfect. The results are astonishing.
Beyond the technical prowess, Cardboard is a quietly subversive critique of consumption and waste. A crumpled box in the hands of Monneraud is no longer refuse, no longer disposable. It is, instead, an object of desire—exalted, preserved, given permanence in a way that defies its original nature. In an age where excess is an unavoidable condition, his ceramics serve as an elegant provocation: What does it mean to create something that lasts? What happens when the throwaway becomes timeless?
His recent showcase at the Saint-Sulpice Céramique in Paris was met with a kind of hushed astonishment. Visitors ran their fingers along the deceptive ridges of a sculpted cardboard pitcher, half-expecting the delicate flimsiness of paper beneath their touch. The surreal tension between the material and the form created a sense of quiet wonder—a recognition of something mundane turned mythical.
Monneraud’s pieces feel as though they belong in some forgotten storeroom of an old palazzo, where time moves differently, where objects retain their histories like whispered secrets. There is an intimacy to them, a sense of past lives wrapped in the layers of fired clay. To own one is to possess an artifact of contradiction: fragility made indestructible, impermanence cast into eternity.
Jacques Monneraud’s Cardboard collection is a reminder that the most exquisite things are often those we fail to notice. But once seen, they are impossible to forget.
