GUSTAVO PÉREZ

Front cover (from left to right):Vase-Sculpture, 201217 x 25 x 20 cm(GP-0012)

Sculpture, 201219 x 21 x 21 cm(GP-0010)

Opposite:Vase, 2011 20 x 14 x 10 cm (GP-0002)

“In the last few years, a feeling of confidence and freedom (or at least a strong drive towards it) has made the forms change drastically. The original form continues to be the cylinder, this rarely changes, but now the pieces go in many different directions. “

Gustavo Pérez

GUSTAVO PÉREZ

14 March - 5 April 2012

Erskine, Hall & Coe Ltd15 Royal Arcade, 28 Old Bond Street

London W1S 4SP

+44 (0) 20 7491 1706mail@erskinehallcoe.comwww.erskinehallcoe.com

From left to right:Sculpture, 201018 x 18 x 13 cm(GP-0020)

Vase-Sculpture, 201116 x 18 x 15 cm(GP-0007)

Gustavo Pérez

Sitting at my desk I have a restricted outside view; just a wall of London stock bricks, which nevertheless, has endless subtlety of tone. Closer to hand, on an adjacent shelf, is a miniature landscape of pots: bowls by Lucie Rie and Jennifer Lee, a twisted form by Shozo Michikawa and a vessel by Gustavo Pérez. These pots from three continents are good companions.

I can remember the day I acquired the Pérez vessel. It attracted me because it reminded me of the work of the Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana and David Whiting, the distinguished writer on ceramics, noted the same in the catalogue of Gustavo Pérez’s Galerie Besson 2001 show. Having seen more of the work of both artists in the past decade I appreciate now that the resemblances are superficial. Fontana first pierced a canvas in 1948 in ‘a rage of frustration’. His piercings and slashings were acts of iconoclasm, random and even sexual. This is not the approach of Gustavo Pérez. As he recently said to me ‘everything I make has to do with love for clay, there is no violence in it at all. Clay is more responsive than canvas, it doesn’t simply tear.’ The US critic Garth Clark was receptive when he wrote of Pérez’s ‘gentle cuts’.

Gustavo Pérez began his life as a potter forty years ago. In 1971 he had some sort of epiphany, or perhaps a Proust moment, when he was struck by the scent of fresh clay and realized the possibility of giving it form on the wheel. ‘It caught me in its trap forever.’ As a new potter Pérez did not feel he had any tradition on which to draw. Over the years there has been a direct and continual dialogue with materials. Richard Sennett could have been referring to Gustavo when he said ‘craftsmanship is based on slow learning and on habit’. Like all top class art his work is constantly in transition.

In Contemporary Ceramics (Thames & Hudson 2009), the late and much missed Emmanuel Cooper, grouped Gustavo under ‘Architectural Aesthetics’ along with potters such as Bodil Manz and Karin Bablock. Certainly

many of Gustavo’s pots have an architectural quality. Perhaps it was his education in engineering which gave him a love of precision, an ability to develop the play of light and shadow, and sometimes an industrial simplicity.

As an admirer of Hans Coper he seeks to produce ‘objects of complete economy’. Yet even at his most austere there is a delicate sensuousness in his work as he not only cuts, but folds, inlays and paints on clay to emphasise its anthropomorphic qualities. Gustavo is not a pretentious artist. He says ‘I can’t think of a better way to define my work than by quoting what Franz Schubert once said, ‘I just finish one piece and begin the next’’.

In the eleven years since Gustavo Pérez ‘s work last graced a London gallery, his voice has become more distinctive, the use of colour more exciting, his love of music more evident in his work. These new pots retain his great sense of precision and skill, yet with an increased sense of rhythm, tension and muscularity. There is a willingness to take risks.

And after half a lifetime of absorbing the aesthetics of modernism there are also powerful echoes of traditional American aesthetics – of Mimbres pots and pueblo architecture, sacred artefacts from the future transported to a Yucatan temple.

Lucian Freud said ‘Art derives from art’; perhaps not always with the deliberate intention of the artist. The art of Gustavo Pérez conveys a multiplicity of meanings. These pots are truly multi-vocal.

David Miles

Vase-Sculpture, 2012 22 x 25 x 25 cm(GP-0013)

I am very pleased to be showing my work here in London again. The first time was in 2001 and I believe that several differences should be visible. In the last few years, a feeling of confidence and freedom (or at least a strong drive towards it) has made the forms change drastically. The original form continues to be the cylinder, this rarely changes, but now the pieces go in many different directions.

Some can be called vases, that is what they are.

Many others do not properly deserve such a name, because even if they have a bottom and the form reminds of a vase form, they are just too far from any possible use. I call them vase-sculptures.

And there are still several others where the cylinder is the departure for experimenting in opening the form as far as possible. An interest that came after the years of the compressions (2005-2008), when after going to the most extreme of the possibilities of compaction of the thrown form, I felt as a logical necessity that the form should open again. The compressions were the seeds, I hope the open forms can be as open as flowers.

Gustavo Pérez

Left to right: Sculpture, 2012 27 x 31 x 31 cm(GP-0009)

Vase, 2012 26 x 27 x 27 cm(GP-0011)

Vase-Sculpture, 201122.5 x 35 x 32 cm (GP-0005)

Sculpture, 201223 x 30 x 30 cm

(GP-0015)

Vase-Sculpture, 201224 x 31 x 31 cm (GP-0014)

Vase-Sculpture, 201222 x 27 x 27 cm

(GP-0023)

Vase, 201225 x 29 x 29 cm (GP-0022)

From left to rightVase, 2010

30 x 18 x 18 cm(GP-0019)

Vase, 201117.5 x 19 x 16.5 cm

(GP-0006)

Vase-Sculpture, 201224 x 27 x 27 cm(GP-0021)

Vase, 200927 x 24 x 25 cm

(GP-0001)

Vase-Sculpture, 201120 x 23 x 23 cm (GP-0003)

From left to rightSculpture, 2011

15 x 20 x 11 cm(GP-0018)

Sculpture, 201120 x 23 x 17 cm

(GP-0016)

Vase, 201123.5 x 23 x 20 cm (GP-0004)

All works are stonewareAll works shown in the exhibition will be fully illustrated on our website

www.erskinehallcoe.com/exhibitions/gustavo-perez-2012

photography by Michael Harveyprinted at The Lavenham Press

design by fivefourandahalf

© Erskine, Hall & Coe Ltd, 2012

AboveGustavo Pérez in his studio.Photograph courtesy Gustavo Pérez

Back coverSculpture, 201117 x 34 x 12 cm (GP-0017)

Gustavo Pérez was born in Mexico City in 1950. He studied Engineering, Mathematics and Philosphy at the University of Mexico and then enrolled at the Design and Crafts School in Mexico City to study ceramics. He lives and works in Veracruz, Mexico and Prissac, France. He has exhibited widely in Mexico and also in the United States, Cuba, Japan, Korea, Canada as well as throughout northern Europe. He has been invited on various occasions to direct courses and workshops in Germany, France and Spain. Since 1994, he has been a member of the International Academy of Ceramics and is now a member of the board. In 2005 he was honoured with a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico.