Anne Egger – Wifredo Lam or the Exultations of the Unpredictable

FIRE TONGUES
Wifredo Lam
Ceramics
galerie gmurzynska

Wifredo Lam or the Exultations of the Unpredictable by Anne Egger
Damp clay, enamels, kilns, yet you are neither
ground nor sky nor water nor fire but the
dust of atoms and of the same grain: that of
metamorphoses.
(Serge Sautreau)
Wifredo Lam (1902-1982),
internationally renowned for his
painted work and his prints, was a
man without frontiers, an unbounded
creator. Of Cuban origin, a great
defender of forgotten or oppressed
cultures, he put all his talent
into exercising the powers of his
imagination. He was a pioneer of
multiculturalism, both synthetic and
syncretic, a forerunner in conceiving
of an international modern art and
one of the first of his countrymen
to poetically revisit Caribbean
mythology. Rising up at the
crossroads, his art – through its many
different techniques – re-engages the
telluric forces of nature, impelling us
to contemplate what is universal and
authentic to our existence. When the
time was ripe for Lam to work with
ceramics, he experienced these forces
hands-on, producing metaphoric,
highly original creations.
During his whole life and throughout
his numerous travels and encounters,
Lam never ceased to renew, or
interchange, his different modes of
expression. In 1917, a student in
Havana, he followed a calling for
sculpture before opting for painting.
He began to take an interest in
ceramic work, periodically, beginning
in the 1950s. After a few trials with
the medium in Cuba and in Italy, he
was encouraged to pursue ceramics by
the Danish artist, Asger Jorn. There
are ceramics that were created jointly
by both artists, like the vase from 1959
exhibited here. While Lam decorated
a set of dishware and made his first
sculptures in the year 1970-1971, he
took his definitive leap into the art of
ceramics in 1975, “beating the barrier
of the air” [René Char] and making
it his true passion. It was no accident
of fate that he had just completed
several trips to India. In India, he had
seen how earth as a material enters
every aspect of life, from religion to
architecture and where numerous
potters, all of lower caste, work with a
wide variety of regional traditions.
From 1960, Lam divided his time
between Paris and Albissola, the
Italian capital of ceramics – the
equivalent of Vallauris his friend
Picasso brought out of oblivion.
Similarly this small village of
fishermen and potters on the Ligurian
coast had its place on the map ever
since the Renaissance but only truly
made its mark in the 20th century.
As early as 1934, many artists from
Aerofuturism (also known as the
Second Futurist movement) – Rosso,
Munari, Fillia, Farfa and Lucio
Fontana – frequented the Mazzotti
factory in Albissola. It was Tullio
Mazzotti who, in 1938, joined
Marinetti in signing the Manifesto
futuristo della ceramica e aeroceramica.
After the war, Albissola attracted
artists from all over the world. It was
this remarkable collaboration between
artists of the avant-garde and local
artisans that propelled this ancestral
tradition into the domain of the arts.
In August 1954, Asger Jorn and two
veterans of the Nuclear movement,
Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo,
the group that had founded the
International Movement for an
Imaginist Bauhaus only the year
before, organized an international
event in Albissola, the Incontri
Internazionali della ceramica. Among
the artists who gathered at the
Mazzotti factory were those affiliated
with the Spatialist movement such
as Lucio Fontana, Crippa, Dova;
the CoBrA artists, Corneille and
Karel Appel; but also Matta, ousted
from surrealism; Guy Debord; and
Édouard Jaguer who had created
Phases. United in their stand against
geometric abstraction, functionalism
and cultural conformism, they came
together for several days to embrace
and promote an experimental attitude
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to art. Wifredo Lam found the
invitation from Jorn – his friend since
1946 – upon his return from Cuba.
Very much taken by the proposal,
he set off immediately, only to arrive
too late: the artists had already left
the Ligurian coast. Lam, whose work
and exhibitions kept him constantly
traveling between Paris, New York,
Caracas, Malmö and Stockholm
– including a voyage to the Mato
Grosso with a team of gold diggers
– did not return to Albissola until
the summer of 1957, the year Jorn
and Debord founded the Situationist
International. Increasingly drawn
to the place for its cosmopolitan,
free and friendly atmosphere, Lam
returned every year before making
it his permanent residence in 1962.
Jorn, who encouraged him to try his
hand at ceramics, introduced him
to the Ceramiche San Giorgio, a
studio founded by Eliseo Salino and
Giovanni Poggi in 1958. Over the
years, Salino and Poggi welcomed and
accompanied over 170 artists when
they came to experiment with and
create in ceramics: Fontana, Sassu,
Fabbri, the Chinese artist Hsiao Chin,
the Argentinean artist Carlos Carle….
This artistic laboratory is where Jorn
executed, in 1959, his monumental
artwork for the Aarhus high school
– a true feat, considering this is the
largest ceramic work (100m2) ever
created.
Wifredo Lam’s first ceramics from this
period – incised tondi or panels in
relief – set the tone for his later works.
But he appeared to lack confidence,
admitting at this stage: “I didn’t feel
very comfortable with this medium I
couldn’t dominate.” He did assimilate
the difficult technique, however, but
without great enthusiasm. Perhaps he
didn’t feel ready to let the medium
guide him or maybe the firing process
proved too challenging, for it led
to more accidents than successes.
Even though Lam did not take up
ceramics again for ten years, the
experience had given him a taste of
the alchemical processes involved
and alchemy had always fascinated
him – ever since the 1940s. The
metamorphosis of his figures and the
environment, the state of perpetual
transformation echoing Afro-Cuban
myth are the expression in his
paintings of the alchemical notion of
uniting spirit and matter.
Two years after the death of his
friend Jorn, in the summer of 1975,
Wifredo Lam once again took to
the road of San Giorgio. This time
ceramics became his passion. He
threw himself into the new plastic
medium with unbridled energy and
motivation, Giovanni Poggi always at
his side to assist him and administer
to his needs. Lam evokes this period
as a “new emotional experience,” for
“working earth and fire is a passionate
act.” He set aside the tools of the
painter and plunged into the material.
The metamorphosis carried out by
the hand that models or structures is
humanity’s oldest creative act. And
likewise, since time immemorial,
setting a pattern on a plate has
ritual and symbolic meaning.
Ceramic work is an operation that is
experimental by definition; it is also
an act of magic where chance and
the unknown rule supreme. Not only
are the colors applied with a blind
palette, but the fire transforms the
human act. “What has interested me
from the start is to follow the almost
alchemical mutations which allow
the pictorial sign to enter the state of
being a volume within space,” said
Lam, before adding: “I do this for
the creative freedom of art.” Indeed,
he once compared this exulted and
spontaneous freedom to his discovery
of surrealist automatic writing in
1938. Lam worked for months at a
time, inventing something new every
day. Serge Sautreau evokes this in a
poem: “The game, this time, makes
him feverish. He grows so passionate
he can no longer sleep as these
sudden irruptions – accidental –
parade forth during the firing process.
For the surprises tied to the different
intensities of the incandescence,
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the precipitation of colors and their
transfiguration in the ardent cave. For
the metamorphoses the flames inflict
on the drawing, the enamel, for its
dream matter”.
Lam’s ceramic work, in which “evils,
enamels, animals” interplay and
ignite, consists of original, curious
objects, objects diverted from their
utility: plates as masks or spiked
reliefs, sculpted cups which cannot
hold anything. In an iconoclastic
gesture, entirely given over to the
pleasure of transgression, Lam incises
or adds more clay. He chisels, digs,
notches or rolls back whole sheaths
of clay to give a fish its flight. And
hence the artist attained a threedimensionality
that is both ancestral
and tribal in its method of bringing
life to forms. A truly “Lamian”
mythology invades these plates and
tondi – fantastic figures, emerging
from his mind’s fertile world, “an
outside-memory bestiary”: ancestor
made divine, zoomorphic ghost,
totemic sign, traced lines of voodoo
initiations, and more: mask, fish, bird,
horse-woman. They have all come
out of the forest of Lam’s Jungle to
anchor themselves in the clay.
admired by fellow artists and
exhibited the world over. The fruit of
the artist’s dialogue with the earth and
with color, they are peopled by his
dreams. Talking about great painters
becoming ceramicists, Gaston
Bachelard wrote: “They’re the ones
who cook their colors. With fire, they
make light.”
Anne Egger
One of the painter’s greatest
pleasures was to invent new tints
or combinations of colors glazed
by fire, delighting in a form of
experimentation that has no end.
This magician of color knew how to
alternate matt or gloss effects, bright
or muted tones. Unless he chose
to use the aerograph technique, he
superimposed enamels, sprinkled
on oxides or added pieces of glass,
producing multiple and various
combinations. These coatings –
glazes, drops, lumps, cracks, blisters –
which are in fact carefully sought-out
effects, are original creations in and of
themselves.
Wifredo Lam is a protean, multifaceted
artist. His over 400 ceramics,
metamorphosed in the singing kilns
of Albissola, are unique pieces,
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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