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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