sun’s ceramics

Le Soleil, le foyer de tendresse et de vie, Verse l’amour brûlant à la terre ravie, Et, quand on est couché sur la vallée, on sent Que la terre est nubile et déborde de sang;

Arthur Rimbaud, Soleil et Chair (quote)

If the recent paintings of Vasso Triga unravel in front of their viewer as a precious weave, the ceramics which she fascinates us with in recent years are an independent, admirable, three-dimensional universe that appeals to a delightful contemplation and a seductive palpable wandering in a way that a wild and secret garden of miracles would.

The hybrid organic forms, invented by the artist herself, courageous in size and embellished with unexpected malleable elements, pulsating to the bare breath of their own shell, staggered by charming conjunctions of feverish lines, un-decrypted scriptures, and intense colors that stretch from a transparent and gentle light blue followed by white streaks and tropical emerald traces to earthy terracotta, the multicellular blue of Mediterranean myths and the dark fields of the shadows, do not directly correspond to any aspect of our past knowledge.

Their succulent primordial essence, adorned with a rapid gestational process which each time generates a different and unprecedented ceramic subject, often doudle-sided in terms of both use and reading, springs from the same ancient Mediterranean sources, is moulded from the same archetypal mud, dries under the same benevolent sun that gave volume, pace, and breath to both prehistoric and contemporary Mediterranean ceramic plains of pithoi and amphorae who sang the joy of life in past centuries. Creatures of the land, the sea and the air, flowers and trees, stars, birds and amphibians, fish, corals and shells, embellish the curves and hollows of these bodies, engrave themselves on the glossy surface, and call for an impromptu celebration. The ceramic realm of Vasso Triga, utterly gilded with precious resources mined by human creation, those which do not fall under strict classification, but which organically belong to our valued European cultural memory, is delightfully balancing between the restless stuccoes of the Minoan seabed and the medieval Cypriot engravings, between the embossed renaissance worlds of Bernard Palissy, the traditional pottery of Vallauris, the psychedelic fields of Miquel Barcelό or the orgiastic fauns and Picasso’s human-shaped suns.

And it is precisely here, on the same Mediterranean bed, within the breath of this magical universe, and by the open gates of the South, that, by sealing as a symbolic visual and tactile condensation this ceramic universe of delights, the brilliant threedimensional suns of the artist are born and suddenly rise.

Iris Kritikou January 2019