Geert Lap at Garth Clark - ceramics exhibition; New York, New York

The Dutch ceramist Geert Lap makes utensils But the longer one direct the eyeed at those in his novel show, the more they strike one as beinged to slip beyond the conventional container form. They are normal utensil size (about a foot tall), they are render free of access at the top, and they contain space in the usual way. Their differentness becomes apparent sole gradually.

Lap is oftentimes called a Minimalist. His wheel-thrown porcelains are the two austere and sharply defined. The forms are level and regular, so that from each viewpoint they look the same. He is known for knife-edges, the ultimate of precision and perfection, seen here in the utensils lips and in the rim of a depressed bowl, and recalled in the sharp shoulders of a small in number vases with abrupt shifts in their curving walls. The surfaces are matte and monochrome; gloriously clear colors are characteristic of his work. In this display there was a yellow like liquid day-star and a blue more lapislike than any new sky. In addition, Lap showed a number of charcoal-color works that, being les lyrical in color and contrasting maximally with their white pedestals, concentrate attention flat more acutely on form.

Surprisingly, his works are breathtakingly sensuous. Many consist of stacked parts joined seamlessly in a series of voluptuous bend s so rhythmically inflated they make single conscious of one's own breathing, in like manner thinly stretched they make individual conscious of one's own skin. Lap colors the forms by means of applying pigmented slip (liquid clay) to the surfaces before firing; the utensils are unglazed, so the faint residue of his touch is not distanced by the agency of a glassy covering. Their matte delicacy is, in fact, part of their power.

Despite the perfection of these utensils in profile, color and weft they are engaging rather than forbidding. That's because their contours are in the way that liquid, so continuous, that one's organ of sights are continually drawn around the forms smooth though nothing "new" can be learned. oftentimes these vessels create an impression of motion, as if for an instant single could see backward in time to the softnes of the clay as it whirled upon the wheel under the squeezing of the artist's hands. Lap repeatedly favors everted lips that direct the eye as if they were about to flare without into another pneumatic tier. Further, many works have unusually broad bases that do not neatly terminate and separate the forms from their pedestals. single vessel looks like a fat lickpenny boring up out of the pedestal itself (although the undulations in its walls are in fact horizontal not spiraling). The notion of utensil seems too finite to contain these evocative and pleasurable objects

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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