on ceramics & colour

What am I doing at the market? I am searching for ceramics to plate my food with more variance, emotion, and allure. Growing up, my family relied on white tableware, a look I have always enjoyed. White is a staple, certainly. But now, I am longing for contrast. I am longing for colour. It’s a development in taste I observed during last winter’s covid-lockdowns. Spending so much time at home and lacking the visual stimulation of varied environments, my white plates, placed on my white table, began to bore me more and more. They looked like tired, absent-minded eyes, just dozing through the months. I looked back at them with my own weary eyes, dreaming of radiant pinks and blues. Enough with the understatements and minimal colour palette, I decided!

Of course, there are different traditions in food presentations and varied understandings of what tableware, specifically plates, should do. A plate can be a soft understatement, caressing your food with subdued hues, giving it just the right frame to shine on its own. A brightly coloured plate can still assure a minimal look but adds more intensity. It is a challenge to find the right contrast. You want to pick a plate that supports the colour scheme of your dish and potentially makes it appear even brighter. You do not want to take away from the brilliance of its surface or render its colours dull. Finally, a patterned plate provides a whole new level of effects, contextualising your dish in a purposefully eclectic, playful, or mindfully traditional way.

When you prepare a dish, the question of its final presentation instantly enters the stage. Earlier this year, I discovered the tableware of laDoublej, a Milan-based fashion and homeware brand that delights with bright bold patterns. The brand does a phenomenal job at creating fresh, dynamic, and surprising table arrangements. Enchanted, I invested in two of their plates, one from the rainbow family and one from the wildbird series. A vibrant, opulent plate pattern can instantly elevate a dish. The other day, I brought home a simple frittata from the Mercato di Sant’Ambrogio and placed it on my laDoublej wildbird plate. What a scene! What a show! Does a ‘simple’ egg dish deserve such drama? Of course, it does. Now, I seek to add even more colour to my food presentation. The Fiera Internazionale della Ceramica is the perfect place for this undertaking.

The market offers an exciting opportunity to explore tableware, including pots, cans, plates, bowls, and vases, as well as ceramic jewellery and other decorative pieces. Walking alongside the different stands, I delight in the variety of styles, textures, shapes, and colours. Sometimes the designs are so outrageous that I am indecisive about what to think. Take, for example, the stand of the Polish vendor from Lodz. Her pieces are made of big, bright ceramic poppy flowers. In a way, I find them wonderful. Particularly, the teacups give me a seductive sentiment of surrealism. Then, I picture the pieces plated on a table together, and the scene strikes me as utter madness.

Another vendor, Daniel Cavey, gets my attention with his mystically organic sculptures. Some shapes remind me of pumpkins, other of slugs. They seem to slowly spill over the tables on which they are placed and appear calm and unimpressed by their busy surroundings.

After round three at the market, I set my eyes on two stands. One is from Calabria and offers Babbaluti, terracotta-made, anthropomorphic bottles meant to protect your home from evil. They look sassy, a bit scary but at the same time good-humoured. I buy two of them. Finally, I visit the vendor from Roquefort-La-Bédoule, Christine Perrin, and buy six brightly blue coloured ceramic plates. I can’t wait to serve an Insalata di Arance on them and imagine the satisfying clash of blue and yellow. What a successful day, I think, and walk home with a heavy load. I got colour, I got contrast, and my new purchases will undoubtedly bring fun and fiesta back onto my table.