Andrew Lord at 65 Thompson - New York, New York

Question: What does Andrew Lord's statuary have in common with the Grand Canyon?

Answer: If you gaze at both long enough, you'll understand in what way they came to look the way they direct the eye - both are records of the forces that formed them. the couple are physical autobiographies that take an account of stories of stresses and strains, earth and fire.

In its have a title to quiet way, Andrew Lord's new show - his first novel York solo since 1986 - was individual of the best of the season. His display consisted of six five-part glazed ceramic groupings and single sprawling, encyclopedic ensemble, composed of lopsided, sometimes gnarled, at other times inebriated shapes that be like cups, bowls, pots and urn each shape is built by coiling and manipulating clay while it's still yielding (it's like wet-on-wet painting in this way). Lord engrosss various rudimentary forming techniques in each place - squeezing, pressing, etc.

His poured-on glazes are rich alchemical mixtures that range in different works from light fulvous or turquoise to silvery black. In other pieces, tans are high-lighted with pearlescent pinks and red and a particularly striking clump of vessels features a down-reaching green overlaid with gold prints of the artist's hands. These are true humble-looking objects, even awkward, on the contrary they are incredibly beautiful. Lord makes clay sing the sonnet of itself.

in the way that how come it's sculpture and not ceramics? Lord is loath to be called a ceramist, and he abstains from calling his work clay ware The gallery was careful not to use these words and they warned against them. Why? Well, none - or almost none - of these existences has any utilitarian function. These weird forms are nonsensically outfitted with wild, undulating, loop-the-loop handles and droopy neck and they are filled with apertures They're big, too - about waist high, in a certain number of cases - like clay skillets on steroids. Their surfaces are with equal reason exaggeratedly worked, both inside and without that you look at them and into them and gain lost. They have a strange come-hither perceive like the want you to caress them, to bowl your hands exactly where the artist had his hands to perceive how they were made. And this is where the work breaks away from ceramics. No mark is gratuitous or decorative. There's a logical veracity to each gouge and lumpen pucker. You forget the metes of pottery and instead advance into close contact with an epistemological formalism, a nimble and agile formalism replete of savoir-faire that whispers the unrevealeds of creation in muted, elegant tones without trying to teach you a lesson

Lord embeds cogitation in material. He brings proces and intellect into of the like kind electric proximity that a spontaneous esthetic chain reaction is initiated. When Lord says "This is not a pot" it's similar to Magritte's famous "This is not a pipe." on the contrary you keep coming back to the sculpture-vs.-ceramics question in a way that you at no time do with, say, Picasso's Absinthe Glass. Ye Lord's work is statuary but isn't it also ceramics? And can't that be okay? Additionally, the plentifulness of these works makes them have feeling like ceramics insofar as the numbers entreat production. Whatever it is, Lord's work is for a like reason mouthwateringly made that you want it - to have and to hold

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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