November 3 to December 22, 2017
195 Chrystie Street, between Rivington and Stanton streets
New York City, vandorenwaxter.com

Although Brian Rochefort was born in Rhode Island (1985) and studied ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design, his ceramic sculptures relate strongly to a West Coast tradition—and he now indeed lives and works in Los Angeles. That tradition includes Peter Voulkos, Ron Nagle and Ken Price, and the latter two would seem of particular importance to Rochefort, though Voulkos’ explorations into the deconstruction of functional ceramic objects certainly has bearings as well. Nagle and Price conjure extraordinary surfaces, colors and shapes, broaching both the animate and inanimate in unexpected inventive form, in ways that particularly resonate with Rochefort.

Of the 17 ceramic works presented here, 12 are referred to by Rochefort as “craters” and placed on three white pedestals. The remaining pieces are wall based “relief paintings” (again, according to the artist) and incorporate their painted frames through color relationships: think Bram Bogart’s physically present forms and Jules Olitski’s vaporous sprayed transparencies. The particularly vivid use of color and intricate complexities of organic surface and structure obvious in all these works appear distinctly other within an urban environment—however garish and battered they become. An impression of otherness is, indeed, confirmed on discovering that their inspiration has been gleaned from such unspoiled physical phenomena as volcanic ranges, tropical rainforests, barrier reefs and attendant flora and fauna, experienced by Rochefort on travels in Central and South America and Africa.

The process used to arrive at particular colors and forms is intuitive—clearly, Rochefort is responsive to results at each stage along the way to a completed piece. These include breaking up an initial vessel shaped object of unfired clay, dipping the parts into a mixture of clay and mud, and leaving them to dry and crack. Glazes are then added using methods more or less familiar to ceramic production—drips and splashes, airbrushed gradients of color and pools of melted glass. The firing of each piece is repeated after another new layer of glaze is added.

Jozani (2017), at 18 inches high, is typical of the irregularly conical “craters,” and consists of stoneware, earthenware, glaze and glass. A cluster of material around the top edge—circling the interior space—recalls volcanic activity or naturally transfiguring substances: reacting to each other, bubbling, breaking, separating irregularly, clotting, repulsing. This is not just associative of volcanos, it is what actually happened to the materials during the cumulative process of its making. The surface is cracked, both smooth and rough, matt and glistening. Loose patterns appear like pelts, or rocks in laver flows. The colors are warm—turmeric, terracotta, sand, yellow ocher, pale lemon, violet and white. Jozani is the name of a Tanzanian village. SETI (2017) is composed of the same materials but in different quantities and combinations, and with a different color range of blue, blue green, pink, yellow, brown, and white. This time, marine life comes to mind, coral reefs, the cosmos, and meteorites. Again, color, material and process each contribute to the visual pleasure, haptic delight and imaginative connection of the piece. The title references the organization committed to a search for extraterrestrial forms of life.

The wall-based “relief paintings” engage visually with the possibilities of painting and its presentation or, less obviously, an architectural setting such as a parvis. Relief Painting #4 (2017) is a slab of roughly textured ceramic gouged and modeled, colored dark yellow and placed within a frame. Turquoise in the base and internal sides and pale yellow in the facing edge generates continuity and play between the piece and its frame, rather than using the frame as a neutral device within which to isolate the work. The textured surface catches light in such a way as to make two tones. It looks encrusted or weathered, though this is not due to physical process this time, but is just a matter of appearance. Altogether, with both the “craters” and “relief paintings,” Rochefort has contributed to the expanded field of ceramic sculpture and painting, currently such a vital tendency in contemporary art.

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As a stunning show of new work by Arlene Schechet opens at Sikkema Jenkins & Co in Chelsea, we offer this review of last year’s retrospective at Boston’s ICA as a TOPICAL PICK FROM THE ARCHIVES

June 10 to September 7, 2015
100 Northern Avenue
Boston, MA 02210

Working within a notoriously hierarchical art world where ceramics have often been marginalized, Arlene Shechet prefers to describe herself as an installation artist who makes objects, rather than, say, a ceramicist or a sculptor. It is an intelligent way of holding ground. Her beautifully paced survey show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, “All At Once”, gathers together two decades of deft, imaginative and fearless work.

Her art is by turn, humorous, poignant and playfully strange. From the outset we find her in conversation with those West Coast artists who, from the late 1950s and ‘60s onwards, were determined to push the boundaries of clay. Breaking with craft tradition, they redefined ceramics enabling it to be both painting and sculpture at once. The deconstructive element of some of Shechet’s clay works dialogue with Peter Voulka’s 1990’s series ‘Stacks’, for instance, energetic, rough re-assemblages in clay that were confident and masterful in their abstraction. Likewise, Shechet’s bold command of color nods to Voulkas’s student Ken Price’s bright acrylics and dense sensuous forms as well as the delicious pop palette of painter and former ceramicist Mary Heilmann. Bucking trends towards theory-driven work, on the one hand, and monumentality, on the other, whether in the sculptures of Jeff Koons who with Italian artisans reproduced rococo porcelain pieces, but of pop icon Michael Jackson, or the new German photographers with their dizzying digital possibilities, Shechet has maintained her artistic integrity by steadily working through the most elemental of materials, undeterred by its limitations of scale.

All At Once displays chronologically and with choreographic flair how Shechet explores formal complexities across diverse materials, whether paper, glass, porcelain or, particularly in the last decade, clay. Evolving through her highly skilled works is the repeated use of splicing, stacking, and vessel as symbolic form.

Opening the show is a series of heads and figures, roughly approximated Buddhas slathered in colors, daubs and drips of plaster. Though in sharp contrast to the classical Buddha image of burnished gold perfection, these off-beat Buddha forms are nevertheless presented in the round, encouraging one to walk around them in a circular fashion as if visiting a Buddhist temple. Madras Buddha, 1997, is patterned in a cheerful plaid of red, pink, orange and lime, whereas Raga, 1999, has blooming splotches of blue, dashes of black and snaky grays. Buddha heads with wry titles such as“Collective Head”, “Head on Head”, or “Head that Happened”, sit atop concrete pedestals dribbled with plaster like candlewax, resembling her seated Buddhas in their semi-formless, paper maché appearance.

Shechet furthers her interest in Asia in her series, Once Removed, 1998, casting Abacá paper onto molds using blue-prints referencing real locations. Twinned vessels are stacked and re-imagined as stupas, the top with lush ink patterns recalling blue and white porcelain, its companion a white plaster blank.

Target (Gyantse and Diamond Mandalas), 1997, a two dimensional paper work reminiscent of mandalas, and stupa floor plans, has lines delicately bleeding cobalt blue that are both radiant and dense at once. Other works are of indigo or inky blue flooded paper in reverse, allowing the white areas and lines to emerge and glow.

In Building, 2003, titled as a verb and noun, Shechet splices and re-stacks varying vessels, again inspired by stupas. Presented high like a skyline, dark, smoky glazed vessels at either end fade to pure white biscuit porcelain at center. This austere installation, a personal response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, evokes a quiet despair. More buoyant is a 2004 series of large crystal vessels of pearly luminescence including Bubble Up, Drip Drop, and Cushion, in which cleverly inverted curvilinear shapes are stacked or doubled inside one another to a point of delicate balance. They exhibit a dynamic tension between crystalline perfection and fluidity of form.

At times Shechet’s ceramics can seem like creatures dredged up from the darkness of deep ocean floors. What I Heard, 2007 has two symbiotic bulbous forms glazed matt gray, the amorphous surface and velvety finish interrupted by orange aorta-like vents and pockets of shimmering bronze. Using as support a steel stool, Shechet continues her stacking theme, the base integral aesthetically and conceptually to the whole. Her use in these works of raw or painted wood plinths, steel frames, concrete slabs and kiln bricks demonstrates complexities by juxtapositions of color, texture, and form. In Sleepless Color, 2009-10, Shechet shifts her attention to coiled clay, manipulating it into a state of unruly leaning. With its multi-colored kiln brick base and cracked wood pedestal, the piece reaches a point of ungainly, yet unforeseen grace. Now Playing, 2015, shows a skinny white metal frame beneath a hunk of white painted hardwood with missing angled chunks, topped by a precarious pile up of softly bent ceramic bricks in a bubbling white glaze. The whole effect is complex, contradictory yet formally satisfying, Shechet displaying her relish for materials and her penchant for brinkmanship.

Shechet was able to explore a delicate side of her sensibility in her 2012-13 residency at the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory, Germany which saw works of surreal tender moments underpinned by a fascination with the industrial processes of porcelain production. Deliberately inverting expectations, she favored molds as finished forms, or experimented with splicing and re-assembling traditional house designs. Redefining notions of the historically revered material referred to as ‘white gold’ Shechet included dribbled and stained glazes, vases with buttery fingerlike indentations, and the use of extruder blocks made from porcelain waste as worthy forms. We see this in the wonderfully titled Gangsta Girl on the Block, 2012, a headless, armless figurine in a beautifully patterned dress, leaning alert on white gridded stacks that stand aloft like stereo speakers at a reggae block party. After the Flood, 2012, is a pile up of carefully calibrated porcelain presented as if it were detritus: bases of vases, handles, fluting and, unexpectedly, a tiny cut off classical foot, atop a plain upended factory mold bowl. Elsewhere, manic laughing 18th and 19th century Buddhas sit near gently crumpled vases and a glitter disco ball.

Shechet inventively weaves alongside her own works historical Meissen figurines and tableware, creating a lively conversation between periods. Characters such as Dr.Bolardo ca.1738, with rakish hat and moustache, unnerving red lips and pink lined cape, seems to dance on thirteen plates, while a female figurine lies in a dessert stand with an upside down teacup and a blissful smile on her face. A Head of Vitellius ca.1715 in red stoneware, looks sideways and impassively at the room as if unfazed to find himself there. By the entrance is a silent film on a loop, Meissen Porcelain! The Diodattis’ Living Sculptures at the Berlin Conservatory ca. 1912-14 with costumed actors and fluffy greyhound playing traditional figurine tableaux. As a link between the far past and Shechet’s work, it acts as a charming welcome, and on the way out, farewell to the show.

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Are we experiencing a summer of love for ceramic sculpture?  In the last couple of months there has been a critical mass of shows by sculptors that exploit, in vessel-free form, the timeless medium with zany, inventive, lusciously glazed and chromatically exuberant results on view in New York. We’ve seen exquisite essays in eccentric dexterity from Kathy Butterly at Tibor de Nagy; sumptuous, monumental biomorphs by the late Ken Price at Matthew Marks; restrained yet insouciant clay reliefs by Joyce Robins at Theodore:Art in Bushwick. Not to be missed in this rich, sweet vein, in a somewhat under the radar gem of a show at a stunning little space in Williamsburg, Ventana 244 at 244  North 6th Street on the corner of Roebling, through June 14 — is Californian ceramic sculptor Annabeth Rosen in her second New York outing since 2010.  These monumentally goofy tours de force of constructional complexity and formal singularity include sculptural personae that are as defiantly present as they are elsusive or ambivalent to characterize.  A garden gnome that  could a scholar’s rock; a Guston painting come to life that is also an explosing of loo rolls and fruits; and in Mallo, 2013, a crackle-glazed and cracking up (what a riotous conceit) molten snowman who is revealed to have a heart of bubble-gum.  DAVID COHEN

Annabeth Rosen, Mallo, 2013.  Ceramic, 14 x 13 x 12.  Courtesy of the Artists and Ventana 244

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September 16, 2012 to January 6, 2013
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, California, (323) 857-6000

February 9 to May 12, 2013
Nasher Sculpture Center
2001 Flora Street
Dallas, Texas,  (214) 242-5100

June 18 to September 22, 2013
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York City, (212) 535-7710

Upon entering this visually stunning retrospective of Ken Price’s ceramic sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) visitors were captivated by a profusion of colors beckoning one into Price’s surreal world of quirky shapes, forms, and surfaces. (Following a three-month stay at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, the exhibition completes its tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, opening June 18.)  Frank Gehry, a long-time friend of Price, created a sensitive exhibition design that transformed the cavernous museum space into intimate areas.  It is easy to see why Gehry, in his catalogue essay, speculates how difficult it would be for him to live without works of such enigmatic beauty. The first object one encounters is Zizi (2011), a seductively iridescent turquoise clay sculpture existing on the border between figuration and abstraction. On closer inspection, the work’s apparently monochromatic surface dissolves into green-centered islands of different shapes surrounded by successive rings of yellow, red and purple, a visual experience reminiscent of 19th century Pointillism or a Chuck Close portrait.

By both beginning and ending with Price’s last works and moving backward in time in the middle galleries, the exhibition’s installation enables us to appreciate Price’s remarkable allegiance to dualities in form and sensibility: A shifting back and forth between the architectural and the biomorphic, the geometric and the sensual, the majestic and the humble, the tiny and the grand, the humorous and the serious. There’s a corresponding variety in Price’s surfaces, alternating between the smooth and the rough, the flat and the ridged, the straight edged and the craggy, the glazed and the painted.  In crafting these unpredictable combinations of form, color and surface, Price sought to motivate us to examine more closely the manifold worlds around us.

Price’s work offers as many challenges as pleasures.  While, as an individual, he did not explicitly follow Zen practices, his search for beauty in dissonance and imperfection is consistent with a Zen sensibility. The sculptures offer a rough beauty that defies facile labeling, an aesthetic that seems rooted at a pre-verbal level, where the emotional outweighs the conceptual.  Another aspect of Price’s rough beauty is its “primordial freshness,” a term coined by the poet John Crowe Ransom in 1938.  Price’s engagement with the primal informs his persistent and evolving exploration of the void—those openings that live between the inside and the outside. The “Eggs and Specimens” series from the early 1960s, such as L. Blue (1961), are interrupted by slits and voids that reveal a variety of primitive shapes such as slithering worm-like creatures, phallic protrusions, and gooey globs.

Price’s forms become increasingly architectural in the early 1980s. The void-like openings now function as portals or windows evoking, in their uncanny simplicity, the architecture of ancient cliff dwellings and the spirit of minimalist design, as in Hawaiian (1980).  Beginning with the so-called “Rocks” series of the late ‘80s, there is greater complexity at a number of levels.  In works like Big Load (1988), the enigmatic void is in the form of a black cube that is set against a smoothly painted yellow slice that appears to be cut out of a solid orb with a veiny blue surface.  Price’s illusionistic cubes, while reminiscent of James Turrell’s corner installations of projected light, are even more mysterious.  Whereas the ambiguity in Turrell’s projected cubes can be resolved visually, with Price’s three-dimensional voids, it is not possible to determine solely by looking whether it is an extruded cube or a deep hole.  You want to put your finger into it to find out, an impulse not present in a Turrell.  In the next group of works from the 1990s, the voids become more explicitly sensual, with a touch of violence.  The erotic white Arctic (1998) exhibits a painted-red vaginal-like opening or deep wound.

In 2000 Price’s quest for a rough beauty takes on a new focus.  The voids disappear, the forms become larger and more intertwined, and surface color becomes his main concern.  What occurred in Zizi holds true for the majority of these late works.  Upon close viewing, seemingly uniform surfaces morph into innumerable brilliantly colored paisley patterns with dozens of nested color combinations.  Price achieved these effects by way of a multi-part technique. Following his shaping and firing of the clay, he would apply up to a hundred thin layers of acrylic paint on the sculpted form before using sandpaper to painstakingly remove some of the layers, differentially exposing the colors underneath.  In these last works, Price is the consummate painter, transforming fired clay surfaces into dense, yet delicate fields of color.

There’s a Thoreau-like sensitivity to nature in Price’s most successful late work. The structures of the natural world—with its mountains, deserts, tide-pools, beehives, snake skins, etc. — are the touchstones for his non-literal fusion of color, surface, and shape.  As Price’s work matured, color changed from a substance to be applied ‘top down’ to a more organic process that appears to evolve ‘bottom up’ to satisfy the needs of form. That is, Price’s ability to map certain colors onto certain forms (as opposed to others) projects a certain inevitability that simulates nature’s functional imperatives, as when the feather color of a Blue Jay or a peacock is determined by natural selection to improve mating capability. Price’s structures embody a Zen orientation to nature that values aging and its concomitant limitations.  Certain Price forms can be interpreted as capturing the ravages of time.  One can perceive the frailty and vulnerability of the human condition in his early “Eggs and Specimens” series and especially in the veiny surfaces of his later works like Big Load (1988).  Price’s empathy for the human condition can also be experienced in his slumping, teetering, and sometimes wounded forms, as well as in some of his last more anthropomorphic sculptures that resemble strange, sometimes vulnerable creatures lying on their backs with their limbs flailing in the air or sitting upright to beckon you.  These works harbor a pathos and poignancy that sneaks up on you.

From the perspective of recent art history, Ken Price has turned on its head Donald Judd’s argument that specific objects should replace painting.  In creating paintings that are essentially three-dimensional fields of color, Price re-invigorates the exploration of color as an aesthetic force across mediums.  In effect, not only did Price blur the boundary between craft and sculpture, but also, in contradistinction to Clement Greenberg’s theory of the singular medium, he blurred the boundary between painting and sculpture.  For his first forty years, Price made painted sculptures, and for the last twelve, until his death in 2012, he made sculpted paintings—all the while defying art historical categories in the name of a visual pleasure principle leavened by an essential humanity.

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As Marx claimed, in the introduction to his Critique of Political Economy, consumption is production. Taking this as his premise, Bruce Ferguson, Dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, has curated a show which is at once understatement and spectacle at Mary Boone .  In the world of art and leisure, commodity and concept collude to leave behind artifacts, treasures, objets d’art.

In this group show, the aesthetics of interior design expose the world of exchange contemporary artists find themselves compelled to compete in.  The logic is simple: people buy things.  Lamps, chairs, pots and various vessels, et cetera, even art.  It’s clear that, despite their initial appearance as everyday items, these are Artworks, meant to be appreciated for their application of skill and judgment, but not used in any functional sense.   They are precious.

In the gallery, one feels the splendid quality of what money could buy.  Art, here, reflects the domestic object, taking its outward appearances, such as table or bench, but dispensing with its more bodily functions.  The discourse on the found object comes to a grinding halt and we wallow in the allure of style itself.

Everything fits snugly into a decorator’s paradise.  Ken Price’s erotically charged clay pieces are colorful in a ruinous way.  It is Rodin by way of Ren and Stimpy, their forms spotted with a sensual leper-like skin of paints. Sachio Hitare’s immaculately lacquered “Obi Bench” is an orange form curving and bending along the floor recalling the luxury of custom car culture in its precision and ease.  Josiah McElheny’s “Total Reflective Abstractions” lingers in the ether of decadent pleasure: mirrored objects on a mirrored tabletop, pristine and perfect to the point of fascination, which is arguably what the obsession is all about.

These items are selling themselves.  The rich surfaces and studied arrangement excite desire as they mimic the representations of actual objects, objects whose use value has been omitted, art objects by default.

Two artists stand out as voices of clarity in the muddle of desire.   Tom Friedman’s school chair, drilled into skeletal oblivion, sits dolefully on the edge of the gallery.  It seems unconcerned about attracting buyers (though a $95,000 price tag and subsequent sale does affirm the position of the artist and gallery).  It’s a morbid irony that the violence he inflicts on an ordinary chair has been trophied to such a degree.  The addition of Lee Bontecou’s work seems odd at first.  Bontecou’s rough-hewn formalism spits in the eye of décor yet in this setting becomes theatrical prop, adding a dose of agitation to the ether of opulence. The work is subject to adoration and adulation, hung on the wall as a symbol of deeply felt sentiment coupled with the ethos of the struggling artist.  It’s meant to anchor the mood and tenor of a room that is otherwise too clean, too surgical, too meticulous.  Its inclusion transforms it to an object of subjugation, effectively transforming Bontecou’s work into an interior design device, retro-fitted to the same rigors of fashion, seasonal tastes, and charms.

The show is great for those seeking an affirmation of values based on exclusivity and the attainment of “high” goods.  Ferguson has definitely exemplified the sense of slippage that exists today between art forms and craftwork.  That alone could be the most redeeming quality of the show.  But this is a manipulation of the senses, a filling of the void of unease and uncertainty created by the slippage we experience, with objects of desire.  This is what commercialism is largely about, but not necessarily art.  The show does not provide a forum for the contemplation of ideas on objecthood or the function of art versus, or in dialogue with, functional design.  With the exception of Friedman and Bontecou, whose works do address the fundamentals of form and our expectations of functionality, the show exemplifies a marketplace where the tools of production satisfy the accumulated tastes of the elite.  Not many people would posses such finery, even in today’s luxury-oriented market.

This is what exposes and undoes the potential strength of the show, what Kant refers to as a lack of “delineation”.  What does it mean to curate if not to pass judgments on taste?  What does it say of taste, or judgment, when we find the purely sensational on parade? There is simply no interrogation to be found.  The exhibition presents art as decoration without challenge.   Which seems rather flip. One hopes that the overseers of the art world retain the gumption to engage us in our consumption of the beautiful in a meaningful way, rather than merely purvey fine goods.  We sit in awe of the exquisite but undergo a loss of power; it is grist for the slippage, however neatly organized.

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