You might be able to count the colors used in any single work by Brian Rochefort, but it would take a long time. The hybrid ceramic sculptures coming out of this young artist’s downtown Los Angeles studio that currently fill the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) gallery space offer a vision that’s so charged with shifting textures and bright hues that it demands a visceral response. It’s not just that these unruly vessels have so clearly progressed beyond all practical considerations of form and function; it’s that they force certain questions, such as, “What’s that growing there?” and, “How did that surface happen?” In an era that’s often dependent on contexts and concepts for the perception of aesthetic value, these spectacular works assert the primacy of the object, imbued with power and energy through direct perception. In other words, they don’t need words to work. They just are.
Operating at a generational remove from the tradition of kiln-fired sculpture that’s often associated with California thanks to artists like Ron Nagle, Ken Price, and Peter Voulkos, Rochefort’s prolific oeuvre endows the medium with palpable fresh momentum. He’s harnessing a sense of freedom derived from intervening chapters in the history of contemporary art, particularly those that include makers of the ugly and abject, such as Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, and he’s doing so in a way that blurs the distinctions that created those categories of value in the first place.
To make his work, Rochefort has devised a process that involves repeated firings. Beginning with big hunks of raw clay, he puts each piece through multiple phases of development that may involve mud, sand, molten glass, and any number of dazzling glazes. Some of these objects have seen the inside of the kiln as many as five times in order to arrive at their current state of revelatory overstimulation. The artist’s popular and fascinating Instagram account is named “energygloop,” but to a newcomer, it might be more accurate to call the work “supergloop,” after the saturated experience of endlessly mutating color, shape, and texture it offers.