American Ceramics, Volume 13, Number 1, January 1, 1998

Ralph Bacerra Needs Time to Play by Peter Clothier

Ralph Bacerra's studio nestles at the foot of the gigantic boulder that give the neighborhood of Eagle Rock it's name. Behind this protected notch in the foothills rears the massive range of the San Gabriel mountains, and in front the whole vista where the Los Angeles basin reaches down to the distant Pacific Ocean. It seems like an appropriate aerie for an artist who, at 60, has already established not only his own unique pinnacle but also a heritage in the history of southern California ceramics.

Born in Garden Grove, a stone's throw south in Orange County, Bacerra moved to Los Angeles in the late 1950s to study at Chouinard Art School. Though he had intended originally to graduate in design, he was soon seduced by the ceramics studio, at that time under the tutelage of Otto and Vivika Heino who taught, as author Garth Clark noted, the kind of "technical fundamentalism" in which Bacerra's work has been rooted since the start. A backward glance suggests a marked contrast, at that time, between the formalist traditions of Chouinard and the newly imported zest of East Coast abstract expressionism that Peter Voulkos and his colleagues were introducing at Otis Art Institute. But from today's perspective, Bacerra recalls no great rivalry of aesthetics. It was, as he puts it, "just something that happened."

It's true, nonetheless, that after a two­ year stint in the military, Bacerra returned to Chouinard in 1963 as head of the ceramics department, and remained in that position until the school merged into the California Institute of the Arts in 1972. It was a period of spectacular success for the ceramics department, producing students like Elsa Rady, Adrian Saxe, Peter Shire, Mineo Mizuno and others who came to prominence in the succeeding decade. Recalling those days, Shire cites Bacerra's quiet insistence on the work ethic, the practical contingencies of glazing and filing and the sheer quality of technical performance. ''This was the period of the 'finish fetish,'' Shire says, noting that "Ralph is the same generation as Billy Al Bengston, Larry Bell and Ed Ruscha. These were the guys right ahead of us, the role models for success."

Bacerra's studio work from the 1960s reflected these qualities in its preoccupation with aesthetic perfection, surface and a glowing interest in pattern and the interaction of color. The results, he says, "were largely utilitarian. I was making casseroles and bowls, not as much decorated as today." Recalling that the emphasis at the time was on the man-­made as opposed to the mass-produced, he adds that he was "very much caught up in that philosophy."

It was Bacerra's purchase of a Tang horse, deaccessioned by the Los Angeles County Museum at the time of its relocation in 1965, that was to broaden his horizons. Living with the piece, he was fascinated by its presence and began to construct his own series of animals, in homage rather than imitation. Chunky beasts in abstracted form with large areas of bright color, each was characterized by a big, biomorphic body, a strange head and four legs whose curving, stemlike design lent the whole a kind of incon­gruous elegance. Exhibited in Bacerra's first New York gallery show, those odd pieces, so different from anything he had done before, gave expression to two new impulses that were to figure from then on in his aesthetic: a sense of gently humorous fantasy and a stylization of natural forms. At the same time, the detail of their surfaces, wrote Garth Clark, "signaled a new complexity in his surface and forms."

Bacerra's abiding interest in pattern and color led him to increasingly complex surfaces during the 1970s, and his always inquiring eye drew on a number of dis­parate cultural sources. Again, his passion as a collector provided inspiration. Not only was he acquiring Japanese ceramics and Imari and Nabeshima pottery, whose technical sophistication provoked him to attempt similar effects in his own studio. He was also maintaining a collection of rare plants and orchids that further nurtured his interest in organic form. Finally, the graphic work of the Dutch artist M.C. Escher; with its intricate, maze-like handling of images, illusionistic volumes and interlocking forms, suggested ways of combining organic with geometric form that Bacerra took on as an even more demanding technical challenge.

The first results of his endeavors appeared in the geometric patterning on a series of platters in the mid-1980s. Monumental in scale, at two feet in diame­ter, and thus separated from the func­tional origins of their form, they provided an ample foil for Bacerra's explorations. Here, on a generally two-dimensional surface, the illusory interlocking play of cubes and cones with cylinders and other geometric volumes was further elaborated by exuberantly decorative motifs of highly stylized exotic birds and flower forms, interspersed with stripes and dotted lines, grids and lozenges, and passages defined by myriad bright flecks and swirls. Requiring up to ten separate filings to achieve these dense, all-over decorative effects, the surfaces alone were marvels of technical sophistication. Not content with this, however, Bacerra added further formal complexity by violating the traditional circular or oval form of the platter with geometric inserts or excisions, wobbling the eye off-center into a visually exciting and eccentric journey through his designs, and compounding the illusion of depth suggested by the images with the added dimension of actual relief. Capitalizing on the technical skills mas­tered in these works, Bacerra ventured a stage further in a new and yet more ambitious series of vessels in the late 1980s. Starting with the shape of a vase or bowl, he pushed it out of utilitarian mode and into volumetric sculptural form by means of a double-walled slab-construction process, often adding a slight torque to the whole structure to create a still more complex and fully three-dimensional field on which to work. In these works, the interchange between actual and illusory geometric volumes became a delicate visual juggling act, teasing the eye with its rich trompe l'oeil effects, and rendered all the more dazzling by Bacerra's brilliant, intricate patterning devices and his glittering dialogue between natural and geometric forms and between bright enamel and metallic glazes.

As if to refresh his eye and his sense of fantasy, Bacerra next turned to more purely natural forms for a teapot series at the turn of the 1990s. Assembled from molded sections of wood discovered in a log pile-roots, narrow trunks and twigs-these elegant and quietly evocative works are far more sparing in their use of surface design elements and more restful to the eye in their allowance of large areas of metallic or deeply saturated color. Charmingly anthropomorphic in their suggestion of quirky human posture and character, the teapots aroused the artist's interest in figurative possibilities and led to his creation of several human figures-male and female-also assembled largely from tree parts and covered from head to base in his trademark decorative style. He soon returned, however, to the vessel form, adapting the virtuosity of design he had developed in earlier works to the silhouette shape of the human head in a series of portrait vessels and portrait chargers. Some of these works, whimsically recycling the twig elements of the teapots as hair, either on the portrait vessel itself or on the tiny replication of the portrait that often served as a lid, seem to gather all the themes of Bacerra's work to date in a single, highly coherent statement of a, by now, thoroughly articulated aesthetic.

Today in the studio. however, it seems that the artist is reaching for a quieter, perhaps more classical posture: his recent porcelain cloud vessels derive from an invitation to create a ritual, nine-candled menorah for The Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Casting about for a suitable image to represent the spiritual dimension he needed, he settled on the spiral "horse's eye" pattern that he found in Asian pottery and scroll paintings as a stylized representation of clouds, and on the versatile celadon glaze to evoke a sense of classical serenity. Condensing all Bacerra's earlier geometric high jinx into a single, tightly-packed and whimsical miniature atop the vessel's lid and severely restricting the decorative area on the body and base, these works allow ample surface space for the eye that seeks rest between the passages of activity. The celadon glazes, ranging from delicately crackled white to deep, seemingly trans­parent hues with hints of green, or blue or brown, suggest a new sense of authority in the artist's touch, and a new trust that silence, too, is eloquent.

Where next? Working in his studio the clay before his 60th birthday, Bacerra seems relaxed about the future. Having just cancelled a spring exhibition in New York, he is especially pleased to have freed up some time from the familiar pressure of having to deliver work on deadline. "A lot of what l do," he says, ''derives from the process. I just pick up the clay and see what I want to do with it. I need the time to play."