Ceramic art has enjoyed a revived interest in recent years, and has been starring at the forefront of the collectible design world, which illuminates artists that explore with the clay and take ceramics to new horizons. One of them is Los-Angeles-based American ceramist Jay Kvapil, whose solo show Landscapes has opened last week at Magen H Gallery. The exhibition consists of dozens vessels in clay, exhibited on enormous white pedestals and arranged by color schemes. Fit within the mission statement of the gallery, these bowls and ewers are architectural and minimal, while what gives them their artistic identity is the combination, oer perhaps I should say the tension between simple, at times delicate wheel-shaped forms with complex, colorful glazes. Tension to Kvapil, he says, is the essence of any form of art. Known as an educator, and is currently the Dean of the College of Arts Media, and Communication at California State University In Northridge, California, Kvapil has earned master in ceramics and his work is rooted in the world of Japanese tea ceremony and the aesthetics of the Japanese garden on the one hand, and in the local landscape fabric of the Arizona desert, where he grew up. The pieces look as they bridging the magical canyons, rocks, and stones of the West with the moss and the wabi-sabi of the Japanese garden. This complexity is achieved by the ambitious way in which Kvapil pushes the boundaries of glazing, achieving glazes that melt, fuse, bubble, crawl, and drip in the heat of the kiln, capturing Landscapes.
