Benjamin Poulanges is a multifaceted artist, working across painting, ceramics, design, and scenography. His body of work is defined by an instinctive yet meticulously crafted language where material, gesture, colour, and form seamlessly converge. Trained in interior architecture and design, Poulanges launched his career alongside Hilton McConnico before founding Studio Poulanges in 2007. The studio specialises in scenography and experiential design for luxury brands. This work informs a parallel, independent artistic practice focused on experimenting with materials and surface effects, and the cultivation of a distinct, unique abstract language.
Poulanges was introduced to ceramics in 2016 during an invitation to the Rometti factory near Rome. There, he discovered a demanding medium that requires decisive, deliberate gestures and leaves no room for hesitation, profoundly shaping a whole new area of his practice. Utilising the green clay from Sansepolcro, a material used since Etruscan times, he creates intricate textures and striking contrasts where the languages of painting and ceramics distinctly converge.
In 2018, he created his first body of work, the Orage series, which has since come to be seen as the cornerstone of his relationship with ceramics. Comprising fifteen pieces, this inaugural collection radiates a raw, elemental energy and an instinctive, sensory engagement with colour and texture. His ceramic sculptures – unstable yet anchored, their surfaces streaked with black, white, and cobalt blue – suggest skies on the brink of storm or moments of fleeting calm. With Orage, Poulanges already articulated the elements that would become his signature: rhythm, expressive materiality, and a finely held tension between chaos and serenity.
Inspired by the foundational role of painting in his practice and driven by a constant desire to break with convention, he created the Origine series in 2022. This collection, which unites ceramics with antique forms, abstract canvases, and pieces of art furniture, explores the fertile tension between roots and reinvention, and between ancestral movements and the impulse toward freedom. The artist employs a style that is both spontaneous and controlled. His harmonious compositions feature interacting blacks, whites, and blues, while vibrant garnet and orange hues introduce a warmth that contrasts with and beautifully complements the cooler shades of the palette. In the same spirit, Poulanges extends his visual language to furniture, where form and function converge in a seamless dialogue. Side tables, with their painted ceramic tops, carry forward the gestures of his practice, transforming everyday objects into vessels of expression. Drawing inspiration from classical design, each piece is reimagined through a resolutely contemporary lens, revealing the natural continuity that binds his diverse artistic disciplines.
In 2024, the Ancêtres series introduced figurative elements into his previously abstract practice for the first time. These open, suggestive silhouettes, free of literal representation, invite viewers to project onto them a face or memory of their own choosing. Composed of three canvases and five ceramics, the series humanises abstraction without diminishing its enigmatic quality. Simultaneously, he initiated a textile collaboration, most notably with Pinton, which culminated in the Aurorerug, a creation that faithfully translates his painterly language into woven form.
In 2025, Benjamin Poulanges unveiled the Châteaux de sable series and Rainbow series: collections of ceramic sculptures that revisit the fragile, playful architecture of childhood. Solid yet suffused with a sense of lightness, the Châteaux de sable evoke memories of play and the construction of dreams, capturing the quiet gestures that shape our growth – hands in the sand, fingers slick with water, and towers built only to collapse. The Rainbow series, in turn, recalls a different kind of childhood memory: the vivid delight of sour sweets. Each sculpture becomes a fragment of an inner world, suspended in a space outside of time. They conjure the lingering echoes of a child’s imagination – a place where dreams take shape freely, untouched by the concerns of tomorrow. Through these two series, the artist continues to investigate forms of memory and the intimate, meditative gestures that define the creative process.
Benjamin Poulanges has emerged as a visual artist for whom painting, ceramics, and furniture articulate a singular, interconnected language. His work explores what persists and what fades, what resurfaces or transforms, guided by the expressive possibilities of matter and emotion.