Bas-Reliefs

We could look at Ronan Bouroullecs ceramic bas-reliefs and see traces of a language we recognize: the silhouettes of familiar objects, the contours of known landscapes. We might be tempted to look at the work as an alphabet of mere things, think of the pieces objectively. But as tableaux, the reliefs are not quite right: one has an edge that goes too far, another a circle thats off-center and about to roll, and still another, a pinkish mass that could topple over. Bouroullecs work is most rewarding if we listen as it asks for a new language altogether. Languages have always been born from clay (one thinks of cuneiform seals); its easy to believe that Bouroullec is developing his own. At the very least, these pieces somewhere at the intersection between painting, sculpture, and design demand new verbs, words like bevel and disintegrate. (And its possible, the works say, that there is nothing so lovely as a beveled edge: the way they taper is like a caress. The way they dissolve onto a background feels digital and also deeply analogue. These effects are both visual and tactile, as in: we see them and we want to touch them. ) The compositions can speak because they are alive, masses of ceramic breathing in a metal atmosphere, on a planet that is strange but inviting. Like other languages, Bouroullecs seems to have a grammar. Forms repeat and the palette is consistent, like a dialect. Where there are slight variations, the works prove the rule. Some compositions get repeated and flipped upside down. Bouroullecs process is also inherently syntactical: while the finished works have the appearance of precise composition, theyre arranged ex post facto from separately formed elements. Bouroullec assembles the reliefs only after the individual elements are fired; some inevitably break in the kiln. Like sentences, Bouroullecs compositions are sequences of fixed parts. Like poetry, theyre subject to randomness. In a photo from Bouroullecs studio, he leans over a makeshift table on which hes rolled out a thick slab of clay. Its dark; hes holding a kitchen knife later it will be caked with residue from the material hes using it to carve. To his left is a pile of thin scraps that have been trimmed from the larger whole; the ceramic retains a feeling of paperiness in the finished works. This has something to do with figure and ground, the glazed ceramic forms (marked with cracks, bubbles, and the traces of tools) buoyed by contrast with the flatness and sharpness of the synthetic surface on which theyve been arranged. The sense of dcoupage careful composition with paper cutouts goes deeper than the formal similarity with Bouroullecs earlier drawings and design. Bouroullec has other precursors. Artists longing for new alphabets in abstraction, or those preoccupied with simple forms and chance operations. At its core, though, this work seems to carry o