Waterloo, Canada
The marriage of porcelain and a tire iron sounds conventionally surrealistic, but Laurent Craste’s work is much more subversive than that. In the Montreal-based artist’s current exhibition “Impertinent Abstractions” (on view through January 5, 2025), the very medium of his work—clay—comes under attack. A tire iron is only a small part of it; nails, knives, and darts do an awful lot of denting and piercing, and were that not enough, in other works, impalement plays a big part.
“Disruption,” rather than “impertinence,” perhaps better describes what’s happening aesthetically with these sculptures. Craste, as in his earlier work, largely sticks with the conceit of small plinths for many of the pieces, denoting aspects of statuary. But such elevation now pits itself against objects that are aggressively assailed, physically and aesthetically.
Flaccidity is the issue in Abstraction suspendue I, II, and III (2023–24). The three wall-mounted works are exactly as described: in each one, a long, thin rod of colored porcelain drapes over and droops from an antique brass or iron hook. They look tired, wrung out of aesthetic offerings and expectations. One is not merely droopy but pierced, somewhat disturbingly impaled on a butcher’s hook yet still managing to convey an innocuous bright yellow clothes hanger. We don’t really take to flaccid ceramics, do we? We want them to resist the drag of gravity, rising up from the pottery wheel or the actions of hand-building as vessels, objects, and sculpturally powerful forms, things defying the weight of the world.
Well, expectations be damned. We don’t expect to encounter the murderous, nicely plinthed and beautifully lit, either, but here we are. Craste’s two Abstraction martyre (both 2023) defies gravity’s pull, but only just. The small porcelain cylinders rise from their plinths as bent, dented, and twisted things, seemingly ready to keel over. That impression is reinforced by the two sets of three darts (one red, the other blue) that puncture the forms. It’s St. Sebastian to be sure, he of nascent Christianity and martyrous arrows, wrought in abstract, minimalist miniature. Craste’s cylindrical clay forms are simple yet surprisingly complex, almost human in their contortions. There is poignancy, here, sharp as arrows.
Le sacrifice II (2024) isn’t sharp or poignant, but it is simple: a long narrow bar of porcelain encompassed simultaneously within the flaccid and the pierced. One end rests atop a short, cylindrical base; the other, extending beyond its support, succumbs to gravity, flops over, and eventually touches down on the surface of the vitrine. So, we have the bendy and the droopy, again in opposition to usual ceramic conventions. But we also have the piercing of convention, for Craste has inserted a rather large nail through the bar and into the plinth. This has practical implications, of course, since the nail pins everything in place. But that’s not what it’s all about, is it?
Craste seems intent on reintroducing clay’s plasticity back into the finished state of things, making the pre-fired object—a thing still pliable, still capable of change, of reinvention—a vital and fundamental part of the final equation, after the kiln has converted potential into the hard and fast. Fired porcelain may be strong and durable, but it is impermeable to change. You can’t hammer a nail through a fired porcelain bar without destroying it. Unfired clay, on the other hand, absorbs the shock of the new.
Ultimately, this is all about transfiguration. And that leads to Abstraction sensible (2024). It’s by far the simplest piece in the show—just a small, rectangular porcelain form, a cuboid. Change, they say, comes from within, and so it does here. Craste pushes the rather lovely, albeit ordinary crackle glaze into another realm, where it becomes the revelation of an extrusion in its infancy. Something within wants out, and at the point of the work’s making, it manifests as no more than a bump on the upper surface. Glaze is pushed away, becomes individual islands—miniature continents, even—drifting away from one another as something below begins to work its way toward the light. There’s a redness beneath the work’s pale skin, so a likeness to a blackhead or boil could be meaningful. It’s something physiological. It’s something new.
And the tire iron? In L’outrage I (2024), it nestles within a cleft in a pillowy, white porcelain form decorated with colorful polka dots. Such playfulness contrasts sharply with the menace implicit in the tool. Despite the clear implications of violence, there is no damage here, and all is seemingly well. For the moment, anyway. Transfiguration, after all, needn’t be pretty.
