I’m thinking about simplicity.
I’m thinking about decadence, excess, and the distaste that all of that can spur — sometimes it’s just too much — in simultaneity with satiation. I find you can, at times, genuinely sense both of those sides at once, and satisfaction then arises (at least for me) from the unity of the arc of the moment’s story: even if it includes an interpersonally… difficult restaurant outing or the mess left behind by some kind of big, communal — or at least social — meal.
The environment of this distinctly everyday chaos can be cacophonous and even riotous in a way that still doesn’t exactly go anywhere. Instead, what you find is just the original state of perception and sensation, awash in spills and upheaval, missed connections, and makeup that’s dropped on the floor, stepped on, and shattered before you realize what you’re doing.
And then in that moment — even in the midst of something as fleeting, unresolved, and separate from overarching senses of narrative as all of that — you can just… ponder. You can look, closely even. You don’t have to answer.
Seeing is not isolated to the glorious or held together. It presents itself quietly in a collection of sensory instances laying atop each other, all illustrated in a new exhibition at the art gallery Sperone Westwater in New York City that pairs artworks (specifically, photographs) by Peter Schlesinger with ceramic works by Bertozzi & Casoni.
The exhibition’s invoked spaces bring forward sometimes disconnected sensation that flings itself outward, unfurling a smattering of moments distinctly voracious cast against the upheaval of trying to make sense of it.
The moments themselves become… quiet — an occasionally surprising quiet — as the artworks circulate towards a directness at the core of the real-world messes that Bertozzi & Casoni’s ceramics visualize and the seemingly in-between moments captured and given reverential space in the photographs.
You’re sometimes left with the sudden and startling realization that there is real linkage in the midst of something so sprawling. It’s not a cohesion of visuals or aesthetics, or of things working in directional unison. It’s a cohesion of the mere occupation of space, a quality granted here to facets of life sometimes ignored.
And admittedly, that clarity will never be something we always experience — as a clarity connected to tension, that’s to be expected. But, I think, finding genuine clarity in wide-ranging minutiae is what these artworks posit for the viewer.
Bertozzi & Casoni’s ceramic artworks depict, in part, literal messes, which look like the results of some kind of happy, upbeat gathering that involved social eating and drinking. And it’s not even in the necessary sustenance itself that Bertozzi & Casoni focus; that might be overly romantic anyway, drifting indefinitely outwards. Instead, it’s the haphazard results.
The ceramic artworks deliver a smacking wave of sensory input that’s amplified to a rollicking extreme… something I think we see a lot in our actual environments. The multiple conflicting, progressing, domineering, and decaying realities that we tend to confront in just about any instance of our actual lives — held truths that smash into each other, or just fall atop each other — mean that our world, a concept of existence atop sense that changes as we move through the physical places we inhabit, is a mess!
These artworks ask us to stop and look at it and appreciate the life that makes it all possible.
Schlesinger’s photographs depict scenery that feels familiar enough I get the idea I could encounter much of it just by walking around long enough. We see meal and party scenes here, a street scene there.
And I was struck in the gallery by how all the visual components I was seeing within each photograph looked again and again to truly be occupying and moving within the same space — not just materially, but the same sphere of influence and action. There was a sense of, maybe not the most cohesion but togetherness — even, ironically, between the people in these photographs and the inanimate objects and environments extending around them.
Subjects and their environments seemed utterly indifferent, though, to the camera’s presence, granting us in these images a third-person, outside perspective that contains more of the outline of our actual lives but that sometimes goes totally missed. And the sprawling glances, looks, and scenery we get in these photographs feel genuinely held together.
Similarly, absent Bertozzi & Casoni memorializing their imagery, would real-world correlates of the messes so intricately rendered in their artworks have been even really looked at, at all? And yet, here it all is.
The senses we get of the seen, unseen, and almost seen feel as though they’re pointing the same direction: towards a rich totality of personhood, held in single moments. That’s where it all rests: with people, and their places.
This exhibition of Peter Schlesinger and Bertozzi & Casoni, entitled “Halcyon Days,” will continue through June 21. Thank you to the gallery.
