Ralph Bacerra
American Ceramics
Publication details available on request

Ralph Bacerra's studio nestles at the foot of the gigantic boulder that gives the neighborhood of Eagle Rock its name. Behind this protected notch in the foothills rears the massive range of the San Gabriel mountains, and in front the whole vista of 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 Garth Clark noted, the kind of "technical fundamentalism" in which Bacerra's work has been rooted since the start. A backward glance of history suggests a marked contrast, at that time, between the formalist traditions of Chouinard and the newly imported zest of east coast Abstract Expressionism which Peter Voulkos and his colleagues were introducing at Otis Art Institute, not half a mile distant across MacArthur Park. But from today's perspective, Bacerra today 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, Mizeo 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 firing, and the sheer quality of technical performance. It was period of the so-called "finish fetish," Shire says, adding "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 growing 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 the purchase of a Tang horse, deaccessioned by the Los Angeles County Museum at the time of its relocation in 1965, that was to radicalize his direction as an artist: living with the piece, he was fascinated by its presence and began to construct his own series of animals, though 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, stem-like design lent the whole a kind of incongruous elegance. Exhibited in Bacerra's first New York gallery show, these odd pieces, so different from anything he had done before, gave expression to two new impulses that were to figure from now on in his aesthetic: a sense of gently humorous fantasy, and a stylization of natural forms. At the same time, the detail of their surface, 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, 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 which 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 of 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 bird and flower forms, along with stripes and dotted lines, grids and lozenges, and passages defined by a myriad bright flecks and squirls. Not content with the dense, allover decorative effects, however, Bacerra also violated the traditional circular or oval form of the platter with applied geometric inserts or excisions, wobbling the eye off-center into a visually exciting and eccentric journey through his designs, and complicating the illusion of depth suggested by the images with a 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 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 becomes 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, 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 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 into a single, highly coherent statement of a by now thoroughly articulated aesthetic.

In the past couple of years, however, it seems that the artist has been reaching for a quieter, perhaps more classical posture: his recent porcelain Cloud Vessels derive from an invitation to create a ritual, eight-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 technical high jinks into a whimsical, tightly-packed geometric miniature atop the porcelain vessel's lid and severely restricting the decorative area on the body and base, these works allow ample space for contemplative silence.