“Palatele Brâncovenești” Cultural Centre at the Gates of Bucharest – Mogoșoaia
Galateea Contemporanry Art Gallery
Review
The Magic of Fluid Forms
Using chamotte clay or clay as materials subjected to experiments with firing techniques and processes ranging from the traditional to the ancestral and the extreme orient, Palkó creates a type of expressive sculpture through the special quality of the surfaces. Their carefully crafted texture evokes the geological by suggesting an immemorial layering modelled by water, as in the karst reliefs. In this, however, they are neither rigid nor vertical, for the creative spirit of this craftsman generates undulating, fluid shapes. Their subtle fusions and reflections define the post-modern artist who, perhaps involuntarily, is interrogating the Art Nouveau, so present even to this date in the urban environment of Cluj. His evolution, from the ceramic object to the small plastics, from the metaphor of matter to forms and contents peculiar to sculpture, seems to be inspired by his professor from the 80’s, the sculptor Mircea Spătaru, but it is also a characteristic of the new artistic wave of Cluj, marked by an expressiveness that re-appreciates the figurative by investing it with symbolic and metaphysical valences. With Palkó, we speak of a figural informed by the appeal to metaphor, to the aura of plastic suggestion, rather than of a species of realism, to which the poetics of this refined ceramist is totally foreign. In Palkó’s plastic art, the flow and formation of forms related to geology suggests a metaphysical substrate, a horizon or nostalgia, conferring meaning and tension to the artistic approach.
Like many other ceramists, Palkó also works with a tile “sheet”, which he streaks carefully, using living wood, before shaping it with gentle, well-practised movements, as in an oriental dance of hands guided by a personal choreography that gives shape to phantasms, chimeras, spirits of earth and water. Next comes the first firing, then the application of the glazes and the final, semi-reductive burning, whereby the glaze turns chromatically, with many nuances, towards the sfumato, deepening the shadow and the mystery.
While most of the ronde-bosses were displayed, as a first stage of the exhibition, in the spectacular and austere space of the Mogoşoaia Kuhnia, in the elegant Galateea Art Gallery in Bucharest curator Nicolae Moldovan has decided to order the small, parietal pieces on several levels according to an original scenography. This grants the viewer’s eye the privilege of an overall picture that captures a choreography intrinsic to the work of art, but it also enables it to see its precise composition after principles pursuant of a musical vitalism manifested in the rhythm of the linear textures that define the surfaces first on a perceivable level, and then, as the pulse of the formative energies contained within each work.
It is perhaps this omnipresent vibration, this vital pulse visible in the movement of the folds defining the surfaces and the continuous wave of silhouettes that represents the baroque originality of the vision of this ceramic artist endowed with the spirit of a visionary, a poet and a magician of the form. We salute it with the conviction that it will provide us with many surprises.
Doina Mândru
“The Magic of Fluid Forms”, or Terra Fluida, has as starting point my latest personal exhibition entitled Terra Magica and two other earlier personal exhibitions, Terra-Millennium and Grafiterra.
Terra Fluida is an expression of the tectonic diversity clay can acquire as a result of direct physical intervention. The fluidity of earth, of clay, and the magic of the forms resulting from the action of fire, have an essential role in the creation of metaphorical sculptural forms.
I have chosen this generic title, The Magic of Fluid Forms, based on the idea that “Terra” can represent a symbol for my plastic expression in ceramic art, which emerges from the memory of the ancient artefacts transferred into modern-day experiments – in other words, through the transition from the ancient to the modern, which defines the language of my forms oriented towards a contemporary artistic discourse.
Continuing these experiments with the fluidity of forms closely connected with the effects of fire, Terra Fluida has evolved toward an abstract-symbolic figurative in which the artistic effort is subordinated to an anthropomorphic image accompanied by drapery and mineral incrustations, in which the techniques specific to ceramic art (patinas, textures and effects resulting from firing) come to support and strengthen, lavishly, the plastic expression of the sculptural whole.
Ernő Palkó