On Wednesday April 13, PIASA is holding an auction of modern French ceramics exclusively from the Pascal Marziano collection.
When the visitor enters Pascal Marziano's lair for the first time, after leaving the main road of a small Côte d'Azur town and following a trail leading to an anonymous door, he immediately asks himself a practical question: how will he be able to move in this space, whose every square inch is occupied by ceramic pieces, without causing damage? From the floor to the ceiling, on the walls, on the worktop, under and on the tables, on the bed and in every nook and cranny - right down to the kitchen cupboards, this ceramic freak, as he likes to call himself, lives surrounded by his collection, carefully accumulated for more than ten years. Bathed in the dazzling light of the Mediterranean Sea, which spreads out in front of the terrace - itself colonized by a few terracotta creatures - Pascal Marziano's apartment gives the impression of an immense tropical aquarium, in which an infinity of colors and shapes intertwine.
Jacques Ruelland (1926-2008) & Dani Ruelland (1933-2010)
Ensemble de six vases
Estimate : 7000 / 9000 €
A professional philatelist, Pascal caught the vice of ceramics late and by chance. As a great lover of post-war abstraction, he worships Hans Hartung and devours all available publications. In one of them, his eye fell on images of interiors from the fifties in which he discovered some ceramics. After some research and with a few clicks, he acquired his first piece, a scroll vase by Georges Jouve. It is the beginning of a great adventure made of researches, meetings, friendships, games of tracks and of course acquisitions, which will lead him to be considered as one of the most important collectors of modern French ceramics and one of the most eclectic.
Jacques Ruelland (1926-2008) & Dani Ruelland
Pyramide
Estimate: 1500 / 2000 €
If Pascal Marziano's collection gathers a number of major pieces of the greatest post-war signatures - Georges Jouve, Pol Chambost, Jacques and Dani Ruelland, Suzanne Ramié, André Borderie, to name but a few - it also includes a multitude of pieces of more confidential artists, to whom our collector grants as much emotional importance, in his boundless admiration for the artists. Yves Peltier, former director of MADOURA wrote recently, "there are several collectors in Pascal: the one of the great pieces, those he acquires or those he dreams of, and the one of the more modest productions that he welcomes at home with tenderness and which are his accomplices in a disconcerting game of demystification of the status of collector.
Nicole Anasse (1937-2012) & Michel Anasse (1935-2020)
Set of two 'Chouettes' photophores
Estimate: 1200 / 1500 €
Collecting ceramics is also for Pascal Marziano a militant act, a stand against a certain contemporary vacuity that he intends to fight by privileging the material, the earth, the fire. But it is also and above all a way of expressing its generosity - a quality that all those who côtoient him recognize in front of all. A generosity that he now makes available to other collectors and ceramic lovers by dispersing a first part of his collection.
