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Thursday 6 February

The Silent Whiteness of Edmund de Waal

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs! Edmund de Waal (born in 1964) is not just a mere potter who managed to become the darling of the contemporary art market. No, he is much more than that. He is what I would call an archaeologist of memory, an obsessive explorer of empty spaces, a maestro of minimalism who makes silence sing.

Let’s start with his first obsession: white porcelain. While some collectors on the Right Bank of Paris rave about NFTs without understanding what they’re buying, de Waal has been pursuing a quasi-mystical quest with this material for decades. He travels to Jingdezhen in China, immerses himself in the archives of Dresden, and explores the darkest corners of European history—all for what? To understand the very essence of this substance that has obsessed him since the age of five. It’s as if Ahab were chasing not a white whale, but whiteness itself.

His installations are visual poems that play with space the way Mallarmé played with the blank page. In these meticulously arranged vitrines, each vase, each bowl, each porcelain cylinder becomes a syllable in a silent verse. And when I say silent, I’m not talking about the awkward silence that reigns at openings where no one dares admit they don’t understand what they’re seeing. I’m talking about the deafening silence of John Cage, the kind of silence that screams truths we sometimes prefer not to hear.

Take his installation “Signs & Wonders” under the dome of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Forty meters above the ground, 425 white vases arranged on a circular red shelf. To the ignorant, it looks like poorly stored tableware. To those who know how to look, it’s a meditation on history, memory, and the passage of time. It’s Marcel Proust trading his madeleine for a porcelain bowl.

But what I like most about de Waal is his second obsession: exile and memory. A descendant of the Jewish Ephrussi family, who lost everything during the Holocaust except for a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke, he carries this history within him like a benevolent ghost. His work is haunted by these absences, these voids, these displacements. Each vitrine becomes a microcosm of 20th-century history, each arrangement of porcelains a cartography of the diaspora.

There’s something of Walter Benjamin in his way of collecting and arranging objects. Like the German philosopher, he understands that objects are silent witnesses to history, that each thing carries a constellation of meanings. But where Benjamin saw the ruins of modernity in the Parisian arcades, de Waal sees in his installations the traces of a more personal, more intimate history.

His vitrines are not just containers. They are liminal spaces, zones of transition between past and present, between presence and absence. They remind me of those lines by Paul Celan: “There was earth inside them, and they dug”. De Waal also digs, not into the earth, but into collective and personal memory, searching for something that might resemble truth.

Look at his installation “Library of Exile”, created for the Venice Biennale in 2019. A temporary library containing 2,000 books by exiled writers, with walls covered in white porcelain inscribed with the names of great lost libraries in history. It’s a memorial, yes, but not one of those pompous memorials that tell you what to think. It’s a space for reflection, contemplation, where silence speaks louder than words.

And then there’s his way of working with architectural space. In “Atmosphere” at Turner Contemporary, he creates what I would call a spatial score. The vitrines become measures, the vases notes, the intervals between them silences. It’s as if Morton Feldman had taken up ceramics. The space is not simply occupied; it is activated, electrified by the presence of these seemingly simple objects.

What also strikes me is his deep understanding of repetition. Not the sterile, mechanical repetition of some American minimalists, but a repetition more akin to a Buddhist mantra or Zen koan. Each vase is identical yet unique, just as each breath is both the same and different from the last.

De Waal understands something that very few contemporary artists truly grasp: the importance of time in the experience of art. His installations are not meant to be photographed and shared on Instagram (though they inevitably are). They demand time, attention, a form of active contemplation that has become rare in our hyperconnected world.

His work is also deeply connected to literature. No surprise, as he is himself a remarkable writer. In his installations as in his books, there is the same attention to detail, the same ability to weave complex narratives from seemingly simple elements. It’s as if Giorgio Morandi had decided to write novels instead of painting still lifes.

Some critics accuse him of a kind of precious aestheticism, an elegance that feels too calculated. But these critiques miss the point. Elegance for de Waal is not an end in itself; it’s a means of discussing difficult things with dignity. It’s like Paul Celan’s poetry, which uses the beauty of language to speak of unspeakable horrors.

His exhibition at the Musée Camondo in Paris is particularly poignant. In this historically charged place—the Camondo family was deported and murdered at Auschwitz—de Waal installs his works with a delicacy that borders on the sublime. The vitrines engage in dialogue with the empty spaces of the house, creating what Georges Didi-Huberman would call “surviving images”.

I often think of Theodor Adorno’s statement about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz. De Waal shows us that it is not only possible but necessary to continue creating beauty, not in spite of history, but because of it. His work is a form of silent resistance, an act of faith in the power of art to bear witness.

His obsession with porcelain is not merely a question of aesthetics. Porcelain is a material that carries a history of desire, commerce, and power. From the Silk Road to the Medici collections, from the Nazis’ obsession with Meissen porcelain to China’s Cultural Revolution, porcelain is a silent witness to human history.

There’s something in his work that reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s “Passages”. This idea that objects, spaces, and materials carry constellations of meanings that transcend their mere physical presence. Each of de Waal’s vitrines is like a page torn from an unwritten history book.

I also think of Susan Sontag’s call for an “erotics of art” rather than a hermeneutics. De Waal’s work is profoundly sensual, despite (or perhaps because of) its apparent minimalism. There is something tactile, even carnal, in his way of working with porcelain.

His use of the vitrine as a display device is particularly intriguing. The vitrine is both what protects and what distances, what reveals and what conceals. It’s a bit like memory itself: it preserves but also transforms what it contains.

De Waal is an artist who understands that silence can be more eloquent than noise. In a contemporary art world obsessed with the spectacular, the provocative, the noisy, his work invites contemplation, reflection, a kind of active meditation.

But make no mistake: this apparent simplicity hides a dizzying complexity. Like Japanese haikus that express the vastness of the universe in three lines, de Waal’s installations contain entire worlds within their confined spaces.

His work also raises essential questions about the nature of collecting, preserving, and transmitting. What survives of us? What deserves to be preserved? How do objects carry memory?

I think of what Maurice Blanchot said about writing as a form of resistance to forgetting. De Waal’s work is a similar form of resistance. Each installation is an attempt to preserve something that threatens to disappear.

There is melancholy in his work, yes, but it is not a passive or complacent melancholy. It is an active, productive melancholy that transforms loss into creation. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “It is in the medium of remembrance that the lived experience is deposited like a precious sediment”.

Edmund de Waal is an artist who reminds us that art doesn’t need to be loud to be powerful. In an era saturated with images and noise, he creates spaces of silence and contemplation. His work invites us to slow down, to truly look, to think deeply.

Go see an Edmund de Waal installation. Take your time. Let the silence do its work. You might then understand that art can still speak to us about important, essential things, without needing to shout.

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