Wednesday, August 5, 2015

ESSAY: Peter Lenzo's Second Wind


            PETER LENZO’S SECOND WIND                                    By Wim Roefs

            “Maybe we could come up with something that conveys my newfound second wind and the fact that the work is all new,” Peter Lenzo wrote in a June text message about the title for the current exhibition. He was responding to the suggested title, “New Works 2013 – 2015.” He didn’t object strongly to the suggestion but seemed to think we could do better. “I will think on it,” he wrote.
            That didn’t happen – or, rather, if it did, the results were not revealed. “New Works” is, indeed, as over-used as it appears unimaginative. While it beats the pretentious or quasi-meaningful-but-truly-meaningless titles that burden many art exhibitions, “New Works” often communicates an absence of any attempt to capture in a short phrase the, or an, essential component of an exhibition.
            Except that for Lenzo’s current exhibition, that title does capture an essential component. That would be the very fact, no doubt surprising to many, that Peter Lenzo not only is producing new work but is doing so to the extent that a solo exhibition is in order, even required – and that there’s so much new work that bragging about it has its place.
            New Work!
            By Peter Lenzo!
            Really?
            Really!
            Not that Lenzo didn’t make any new work over past few years, but his output was modest and infrequent. A life increasingly dominated by bi-weekly seizures and the bruised and battered body parts that result from them cut into his production. So did the side effects of his medication, memory loss, headaches and the general tiresomeness of an existence heavily dependent on others and in large part spent in recovery, in bed and in a general state of inconvenience punctuated by protective head gear, a cane and leg braces.
            Lenzo himself had developed a sense of resignation and low long-term expectations, at times reflecting on whether life in his state was worth it and musing about the small number of old epileptics populating the earth. The title of a 2013 sculpture in the current show, Maybe Two More Years, captured his state of mind. Titles of not-much-older works such as Left For Dead, Suicide or Beat To Shit Then Die didn’t exactly ooze optimism, either. Nor did Near The End Dredging The Bottom Life & Death – Life & Death Daily Choice.
            At the same time, there were Old Skool Krispy Kream, ♥, Hanging With My Family or Half A Brain, Still Going Strong, titles that suggested resilience and a life not without joy. Still, “how’s Peter doing,” the question often asked in my gallery, usually comes with worried looks and body language indicating the anticipation of bad news. For the longest time, the news seldom was great. At best, it was not ungood.
            That has changed. Since April 2014, Lenzo has had six seizures rather than the 30 or more he would have had prior to that for a comparable period. He is physically much stronger. He looks great. He’s more alert than he has been in a decade. Rather than counting the low number of old epileptics, he jokes about playing basketball with his son, even though one would advise against that. There are still severe issues, such as back pain, poor sleep and milder manifestations of everything that ailed Lenzo before. But nine months in Detroit last year to help his mom regroup after his dad had died put Lenzo under new medical care. Different medication, including high CBD hemp oil, new treatments, physical therapy and a dramatic reduction of opiate painkillers has done wonders.  
            And so the vast majority of the two-dozen sculptures in Peter Lenzo: New Works 2013 – 2015 were produced in 2015. The sheer amount of post-Detroit work shows the “second wind” Lenzo was hoping to relate in the exhibition title.
Lenzo’s vastly improved health has had an impact on his work. The ability to produce more, and with more control, allows him to explore a wider range of approaches to his typical, heavily adorned ceramic heads steeped in the Southern face jug tradition. Much of his production is facilitated by Lenzo’s friend and colleague-in-clay Ed Bryan, who throws the basic, blank forms that give Lenzo the starting point for his work. “Ed has been inundating me, and that does two things. First, it makes me wonder how I am going to use the forms. Second, it has really motivated me to make more. I can still throw a little but not nearly as well as I used to. It’s something I have lost, so I have a lot of respect for it. When I used to throw them myself, and a couple of them dried out, I figured I could replace them. But now they are more precious.”
Because of better control, many of Lenzo’s recent ceramic heads look more “regular,” more precise, even though he makes sure to leave facial proportions slightly off. He’s been making more torso pieces or figures from the waist up instead of limiting himself to heads, as he had in recent years. “Ed brought a bunch of cylinder forms, so that got me to make more of the torso pieces.”
Lenzo now puts more ceramic shards and fewer whole objects in and on his sculptures, in part to be less obvious about their symbolic narratives. The origins of many shards – say, from his parents’ home – still give them the autobiographical quality typical of his work, but viewers have to dig deeper to understand and focus more on form and shape to appreciate the sculptures. And Lenzo has to make them aesthetically compelling because he can’t rely solely on objects to tell the story.
“I really like those shards,” Lenzo says. That he used them more long ago occurred to him during an exhibition earlier this year of ceramic heads he made in 2000–2002 with his then very young son Joe. “The older pieces were nothing but shards. When it’s a shard, it loses history for most people, but I think the broken pieces tell the same story. Harder to decipher, but in some ways much richer.”
In other ways, too, much of Lenzo’s current work is sparser. No longer does he have to put everything in only a few sculptures, telling the whole story at once. “When I wasn’t making that much, I was spending more time on them and put much more stuff on them. It came out of scarcity. Now I allow myself to look at a piece and decide that it really doesn’t need much more. I think of my work as autobiographical, like a journal. If you only get one page per month to write a journal, you have to put a lot of stuff on that page.”
His father’s ashes are a recurring autobiographical element in the new work. As he has done, and still does, with the ashes of his friend Jim Steven and his dog Sammie, Lenzo mixes them in slip, stains and glazes. This creates different surfaces and evocative aesthetics and, Lenzo says, takes the place of storing memories. “They replace my missing memory. I really like having those pieces around the house.  I like having my dad around. There’s my friend Jim. You can actually see them. I think it’s a much more respectful way of storing ashes than in some overpriced jar.”
“And the ashes fit the pieces. One of the pieces with dad’s ashes also has a little clay guy that my daughter Rox made when she was five. The shards come from one of the small plates that became my dad’s go-to eating plates when he didn’t have a big appetite in his last few years. My mom dropped one.”
            Because his new enthusiasm, coupled with higher energy levels, has caused him to search through vast amounts of stuff stored a long time ago and untouched since, Lenzo is using object and materials he hasn’t seen in years. Discovering dried up chunks of low-fire glazes, for instance, led him to fire pieces twice, the second time with chunks of colorful glazes running down the work as he used to do with glass. There’s more color now than in the past few years, and overall, Lenzo agrees, many of the sculptures seem less grim. “It’s a lot less grim because all the work has an autobiographical line running through it.”            
           
August 2015                                                            Wim Roefs is the owner of if ART Gallery.


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