Anne Egger – Wifredo Lam or the Exultations of the Unpredictable

Wifredo Lam or the Exultations of the Unpredictable by Anne Egger
Damp clay, enamels, kilns, yet you are neither
ground nor sky nor water nor fire but the
dust of atoms and of the same grain: that of
metamorphoses.
(Serge Sautreau)
Wifredo Lam (1902-1982),
internationally renowned for his
painted work and his prints, was a
man without frontiers, an unbounded
creator. Of Cuban origin, a great
defender of forgotten or oppressed
cultures, he put all his talent
into exercising the powers of his
imagination. He was a pioneer of
multiculturalism, both synthetic and
syncretic, a forerunner in conceiving
of an international modern art and
one of the first of his countrymen
to poetically revisit Caribbean
mythology. Rising up at the
crossroads, his art – through its many
different techniques – re-engages the
telluric forces of nature, impelling us
to contemplate what is universal and
authentic to our existence. When the
time was ripe for Lam to work with
ceramics, he experienced these forces
hands-on, producing metaphoric,
highly original creations.
During his whole life and throughout
his numerous travels and encounters,
Lam never ceased to renew, or
interchange, his different modes of
expression. In 1917, a student in
Havana, he followed a calling for
sculpture before opting for painting.
He began to take an interest in
ceramic work, periodically, beginning
in the 1950s. After a few trials with
the medium in Cuba and in Italy, he
was encouraged to pursue ceramics by
the Danish artist, Asger Jorn. There
are ceramics that were created jointly
by both artists, like the vase from 1959
exhibited here. While Lam decorated
a set of dishware and made his first
sculptures in the year 1970-1971, he
took his definitive leap into the art of
ceramics in 1975, “beating the barrier
of the air” [René Char] and making
it his true passion. It was no accident
of fate that he had just completed
several trips to India. In India, he had
seen how earth as a material enters
every aspect of life, from religion to
architecture and where numerous
potters, all of lower caste, work with a
wide variety of regional traditions.
From 1960, Lam divided his time
between Paris and Albissola, the
Italian capital of ceramics – the
equivalent of Vallauris his friend
Picasso brought out of oblivion.
Similarly this small village of
fishermen and potters on the Ligurian
coast had its place on the map ever
since the Renaissance but only truly
made its mark in the 20th century.
As early as 1934, many artists from
Aerofuturism (also known as the
Second Futurist movement) – Rosso,
Munari, Fillia, Farfa and Lucio
Fontana – frequented the Mazzotti
factory in Albissola. It was Tullio
Mazzotti who, in 1938, joined
Marinetti in signing the Manifesto
futuristo della ceramica e aeroceramica.
After the war, Albissola attracted
artists from all over the world. It was
this remarkable collaboration between
artists of the avant-garde and local
artisans that propelled this ancestral
tradition into the domain of the arts.
In August 1954, Asger Jorn and two
veterans of the Nuclear movement,
Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo,
the group that had founded the
International Movement for an
Imaginist Bauhaus only the year
before, organized an international
event in Albissola, the Incontri
Internazionali della ceramica. Among
the artists who gathered at the
Mazzotti factory were those affiliated
with the Spatialist movement such
as Lucio Fontana, Crippa, Dova;
the CoBrA artists, Corneille and
Karel Appel; but also Matta, ousted
from surrealism; Guy Debord; and
Édouard Jaguer who had created
Phases. United in their stand against
geometric abstraction, functionalism
and cultural conformism, they came
together for several days to embrace
and promote an experimental attitude
26