Solange Roberdeau and Nick Schwartz, “Generative Earth”

By DeWitt Cheng

March 2, 2024

Municipal Bonds

San Francisco, California

Solange Roberdeau, “Sundial,” 2023

Two mid-career Bay Area artists who make the Mendocino County landscape integral to their lives and practices are showing small works (all 2023) in “Generative Earth.” Solange Roberdeau is an abstract painter with a background in printmaking. He contributes ten mixed-media works on off-white kozo paper stretched over canvas that replace the bold black gestural calligraphy of earlier work with marbleized gray and brown zigzag contours of diluted sumi ink. The images suggest landscapes and maps, as well as, with their painted central circles, astronomy and microscopy. Nick Schwartz is a ceramicist known for his anagama kiln firing, learned on an early apprenticeship in Japan. He presents eight hand-formed, slightly asymmetrical vessels with small apertures that suggest bud vases, enlarged and adorned with subtle earth palettes and textures that proclaim their sources in locally foraged materials. The media is transformed by firing in 2500-degree kilns into Yeatsian, or “artifice[s] of eternity.” Schwartz refers to them as modern fossils.

Solange Roberdeau, “Bora,” 2023

Roberdeau embraces chance — or at least the famous vagaries of Bay Area weather — in her paintings, which begin with sumi ink poured into a three-foot square basin of water, following the Japanese technique of suminagashi, or, floating ink, dating from the tenth century or earlier. Instead of manipulating the swirling patterns with brushes or other tools, Roberdeau allows the wind to create patterns, which she captures on sheets of kozo mulberry plant paper, which she mounts onto stretched canvas for further elaboration with graphite, gouache, acrylic, spray paint, and even three-inch squares of moon gold leaf. The finished works, with their off-white backgrounds partially covered by irregular gray ink zigzags, suggest landscapes or maps on parchment or vellum. The gold leaf, whether applied in squares, like tiles, or in continuous irregularly shaped islands, connote archaic splendor and the passage of time — to which gold is, of course, impervious.

Solange Roberdeau, “For the Anemoi,” 2023

The centered circles of various colors that jump from the compositions may remind us of the focus or target areas in optical devices, or of planets. They loosely refer to the process of scientific observation and selection, as in “From Above,” “Sundial,” and “The Beauty of Fractured Light,” which reference astronomy. Roberdeau’s poetic titles add additional meaning: “Bora” is named after the Greek north wind god, Boreas. “For the Anemoi” honors the Greeks’ four gods of the cardinal directions (including Boreas). “Verdigris Halo” refers to the gray-green symbol used by Muslim artists to honor historical or religious figures. “Psithurism” is named for the whistling, rustling sound of leaves in the wind. “The Voyaging Eye” refers to slow scanning of the passing landscape from above, the eye being the “strange balloon” imagined by the French visionary, Odilon Redon.

Schwartz’s ceramic vase and bottle forms defy utilitarian expectations to become, instead, vessels of strictly aesthetic purpose and meaning. They are objects of contemplation that is attuned to their subtleties of form, color and texture. Like Roberdeau, he is influenced by Japanese tradition. In the case of the anagama or “cave kiln,” dating from the fifth century, a long kiln excavated into a clay hillside with a firebox at the front, a sloping sand floor for the ceramics, and a flue and chimney at the rear. Each firing takes days, and the fire must be continually fed, so workshops like Schwartz’s Cider Creek Collective replicate the workshops of their long-ago Asian forebears out of practical necessity that complements the pleasures of creative collaboration.

Nick Schwartz, “Tall Bottle #7,” 2023

Burning wood not only produces heat of up to 1400°C (2,500 °F), it also produces fly ash and volatile salts. Wood ash settles on Schwartz’s pieces during the firing, and the complex interaction between flame, ash, and the minerals of the clay body forms a natural ash glaze. This glaze can show great variation in color, texture, and thickness, ranging from smooth and glossy to rough and sharp. It is said that loading the anagama kiln is the most difficult part of the firing. The potter must imagine the flame path as it rushes through the kiln, and use this understanding to “paint the pieces with fire.”

Schwartz’s stoneware sculptures are, like Roberdeau’s paintings, partially aleatory, or chance dependent. Each piece is a survivor of both the rigors of firing and editing by the artist, and is thus a kind of lucky artifact or, to use Schwartz’s terminology, fossil. Like actual fossils, to be discovered by an archeologist requires a series of lucky accidents. The surfaces of these vessel shapes are dark and rich, and can be read, divorced from their sculptural forms as painterly abstractions that happen to be wrapped around a traditional three-dimensional vase or bottle. It’s in this sense that most of us, unfamiliar with the intricacies of anagama kilns, can approach works like “Firebox Piece #3” and “Firebox Piece #11,” or “Tall Bottle #6,” “Tall Bottle #7,” and “Tall Bottle #10.”

Nick Schwartz, “Firebox Piece #11,” 2023

That said, it is hard to resist anthropomorphizing these works, as is our natural tendency. They’re bilaterally symmetrical, yet not perfectly so, echoing the human form. The handmade imperfections and irregularities also serve to make them human, like the emaciated dog sculpture, flattened almost like road kill, with which Alberto Giacometti is identified. They are also spiritual descendants of the painted still-life objects of Giorgio Morandi, which always seem to breathe under our observation.

DeWitt Cheng is an art writer/critic based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has written for more than twenty years for regional and national publications, in print and online, He has written dozens of catalogue essays for artists, galleries and museums, and is the author of “Inside Out: The Paintings of William Harsh.” In addition, he served as the curator at Stanford Art Spaces from 2013 to 2016, and later Peninsula Museum of Art, from 2017 to 2020.