Mathilde Carron-Astier de Villatte’s life was immersed in the extraordinary culture of her parents’ passion for the art of the 18th century
While France starts dressing in vinyl & platform shoes, Mathilde Carron-Astier de Villatte grew up surrounded by antiquities that her parents collected and reinterpreted.
She discovered the richness of Italian Baroque and Roman popular art, most notably, at the Villa Medicis, where she spent two years with her family, her father Pierre Carron, painter and sculptor.
Later, her meeting with Georges Jeanclos was fateful.
In his workshop she discovered the art of terracotta and soon began a close relationship with this noble material, learning to carve, model, stamp, patinate as she grew into her research. Also at that time, she studied at the famous Paris art school “Les Beaux-Arts de Paris“, where she improved her drawing and won the Academy of Art Schools’ David Weill Prize.
She graduated from the Paris Art school in 1989 and exhibited her work in various galleries of the 6th district of Paris. Fortified by her training, she improved her skills of stamping, enameling, firing, and built her work around a knowledge of remaking ancestral processes and inventing her own.
In 1996 Mathilde Carron-Astier de Villatte and her brother created a ceramics line which made a success of the Astier de Villatte brand and challenged the porcelain traditional codes.
Her work found its force between a rough, outlined way to treat the clay, the barely covering enamel, and an extreme delicacy of the drawing, the detail of a handle, an ear…
a language mixed with baroque and countryside culture born from the places of her childhood. At that point, around fifteen ceramists were working in her workshop, using her personal and unique technique. By the time she left Astier de Villatte to set up her own studio, CARRON, she had created more than 350 models.
