Eskil Lam – Fire Tongues

FIRE TONGUES
Wifredo Lam
Ceramics
galerie gmurzynska

Fire Tongues by Eskil Lam
Perhaps the most significant thing
my father ever taught me he taught
me by example: Life does not end
or, in the best of circumstances, even
slow down at fifty, sixty, or seventy.
My father, Wifredo Lam, was in his
late fifties, after all, when he began
experimenting with ceramics and in
his seventies when he inaugurated
his first solo exhibit at Albissola’s
Ceramics Museum in 1975. These
ceramics we are celebrating here in,
Fire Tongues, Wifredo Lam Ceramics,
are the work of a mature artist, whose
own, unique language has become
earth, fire, water, air. But they are also
the outcome of his involvement in an
artistic community that revolutionized
our notion of contemporary art.
Beyond the legacy my father has left
me—the rather mixed blessing of
becoming a world famous artist—
he has bestowed me with the open
book of a fascinating, subversive and
essential history of art.
My father never tired of innovating
and discovering new forms of
expression, thanks in part to his
encounters with such luminaries as
Picasso, Breton, the poet Césaire, and
later, the post-war internationalists
who made Albissola their favorite
meeting place for bringing about
another revolution in art: Asger Jorn,
Enrico Baj, Guy Debord, Lucio
Fontana, Crippa, Karel Appel….
But I am not only thinking of his
fortuitous, notable encounters with
major artists; he was equally at
home with writers, statesmen and,
no less, the artisans, those skilled
craftsmen, who became his friends
and assisted him in ceramic work and
printmaking. Nelson Herrera Ysla,
writing about my father, concludes
his essay by pointing out that:
“Lam managed an extraordinary
balancing act between continuity
and rupture, which only the greatest
artists achieve as the result of a long
process of emotional and intellectual
maturity. Part of this process was the
artist’s ongoing contact with great
anthropologists and people of modest
economic circumstances, as well as his
experiences in cities such as Havana,
Madrid, New York, Paris, Marseille,
Puerto Principe, Fort-de-France and
Albissola in Italy.”
When my father fully embraced
ceramics, he had already chosen
Albissola on the Ligurian coast as his
permanent residence. This is where
we came together as a family over the
holidays. My boyhood memories, to
be honest, are filled more with sunny
days frolicking on the beach than
with high-brow discussions on art or
watching my father paint, sculpt or
etch. After a long day at the beach,
I would often join up with him at
the ceramics factory of San Giorgio,
where he was still busy at work.
I remember having to be quiet and
careful as I wound my way around the
workbenches to find him and Poggi
bent over a still damp plate or vase,
encrusted with strange materials.
You could always tell by my father’s
mood whether or not his ceramics
had survived their night-long firing.
There was no small anxiety involved
in that long wait: the slow rise to
temperatures of 1000° and the long
cooling down process, discovering
how the glazes had turned out or if
anything had broken.
It comes as no surprise, in retrospect,
that my father took so readily to
the art. The medium was an ideal
material for expressing that unique,
personal world we are so familiar
with in his paintings and drawings.
What luxury to be able to mold his
creatures into clay, to give them that
frightening, final test of fire, letting
them metamorphose at will.
No wonder the surrealists, situationists
and CoBrA group took to this
medium with such enthusiasm. By
its very nature, ceramic work offers
the skilled artist a full range of play
and experimentation, and no small
amount of humility—for things do
break and fail constantly. But this
ancient tradition is also what suited
these artists’ thirst for dialogue,
16

for expanding their horizons,
for changing the stakes of their
achievement. This is a medium that
cannot be fully dominated and it
takes a certain trust, I imagine, to let
oneself go and enjoy it. In my father’s
case, this did not happen from one
day to the next and may never have
happened if it had not been for the
insistent encouragement of Asger
Jorn. How could he resist getting
his hands in clay, humanity’s most
ancient, shall we say “primitive,” art
form? So here they are: the figures
of his inimitable world—daunting,
menacing, transparent, masked,
dancing, immobile, proud—set before
us in the shimmering circles of plates
that are not plates, or rising up from
the gentle slopes of unusable bowls
and vases. They are the inventions of
an accomplished artist, an important
player in postwar art but one who
refused to be labeled with anything
but his own name.
Lou Laurin-Lam, Eskil Lam and Asger
Jorn in Albissola, 1961
Eskil Lam
1. Herrera Ysla, Nelson, “Wifredo
Lam ahora,” in Biennale di ceramica nell’
arte contemporanea (Biennial of ceramic
in contemporary art), Albissola,
July 21- August 31, 2001.
17

Imprint
Fire Tongues
Ceramics by Wifredo Lam
20 February – 20 March 2012
Galerie Gmurzynska St. Moritz
25 April – 30 June 2012
Galerie Gmurzynska Zug
© Galerie Gmurzynska, 2012
Concept: Krystyna Gmurzynska, Mathias Rastorfer
Texts by: Anne Egger, Lou Laurin-Lam, Eskil Lam, Jeannette Weiss
Translations: Unity Woodman, Zena Li, Francesco Trabaldo Togna, Donatella Zazzi, ManRey Übersetzungen GmbH
Design and realization: Edoardo Pepino
Coordination: Jeannette Weiss, Maria Florut
Printed by: Grafiche Step, Parma
Images rights:
© Wifredo Lam Estate
© Paolo Zappaterra
© Christophe Laurentin
All rights reserved
ISBN
3-905792-06-0
978-3-905792-06-5