Emmanuel Boos's 98-brick modular porcelain coffee table, each brick Tenmoku-glazed in reddish-browns and inky blacks, rearrangeable by the user
Comme un Lego is a coffee table by ceramic artist Emmanuel Boos comprising 98 modular porcelain bricks. Boos calls it a table-game sculpture, a term that describes both what it is and how it works: the bricks can be stacked, rearranged, and reassembled by whoever uses the piece, producing different configurations from the same 98 units. The starting point is Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII (1966), in which 120 firebricks are arranged in a rectangle on the gallery floor. Boos translates that minimalist logic into a functional object, replacing the raw firebrick with porcelain and the fixed museum arrangement with a system designed for interaction and change.
Each brick is cast and slab-built individually, then polished and fired with a Tenmoku glaze at very high temperature. Tenmoku is an iron-saturated glaze that produces the piece's characteristic color range: rich reddish-browns where the glaze runs thin, inky blacks where it pools. Because the glaze behavior varies with temperature, kiln position, and the thickness of the application, no 2 bricks fire identically. The table as a whole is unique to its particular firing, and commissions allow the size, shape, and glaze selection to be discussed with Boos directly.
The piece received a Jury Special Mention at the 2024 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize. It was also shown in a solo exhibition at Jousse Entreprise in Paris in 2023 and won the Award for Best Artist at Collect 2023 at Somerset House in London.
