Grand Voyage : The Art of Piero Fenci

By Art Historian and Curator Dr. Scott Peck

The exhibition Grand Voyage, featuring the artwork of Piero Fenci, is a thoughtful and reflective ceramic installation based upon the artist’s life. Autobiographical in nature his ceramic pieces reveal insights into his very own existence. Fenci uses his hands with intense mindful gestures to create each work of artistic expression, showing who he really is. The physical merits of the ceramics catalogue the artist’s past, in order to share and commune with the viewer. Reinterpreting and reinventing his history, the artist considers his own connections to other ceramic traditions, relating them to various chapters of his lifespan.

For example, Fenci’s lineage is connected to ancient Italy and Etruscan culture. He utilizes his own ancestry by taking Etruscan forms and reinterpreting them as new formations. Created between the 7th and 5th centuries B.C.E., Etruscan pottery commonly had very shiny dark surfaces that appeared to be metallic. The Pillow, the Basket, and the Urn series all display Etruscan influences in their blue, brown and blue metal-like exteriors. In each of these ceramics, the artist proudly declares his physical and spiritual connections to the Etruscans. Fenci documents his own Etruscan ancestry and DNA through the way he boldly expresses himself on the surfaces of these powerful ceramic creations.

artistic creations featured in the exhibition. Fenci’s wife is of Japanese heritage. Her influences can be seen. Origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, are repurposed and formed into ceramic expressions by Fenci in his Japanese Handbag series. Each work alludes to artistic paper folding in his design approach. Another Japanese influence in the exhibition is the armor from the Muromachi period. Fenci’s Helmet and Shield series imitates and repurposes the protective gear and armaments of the Japanese warriors in this time period.

Water and sailing the seas has been another life theme that Fenci has incorporated into this new body of work. The artist spent years as a competitive sailor. The intense blue, yellow, brown and green glazes of his ceramic creations reflect the surfaces of the various bodies of water that a sailor would encounter. A series called Barges are ceramic sea-like vessel representations. These vessels are a play on the double meaning of the English word vessel as a container and as a vessel as a way to travel on water.

Japanese culture and tradition offer other interesting autobiographical aspects to these new

Fenci takes the viewer on a magnificent voyage throughout his inconceivable life filled with adventures. The ceramic work in this physical and spiritual journey include influences from Pre-Columbian architecture, American Shaker design styles, Etruscan pottery, and the Japanese Edo period. Fenci brings each person with him on his splendid tour to experience these diverse places of tradition that made him who he is today. The Grand Voyage ceramic exhibition divulges and discloses the essence of the artist Piero Fenci, allowing the viewer to see into his very heart and soul.

By Dr. David A. Lewis, Stephen F. Austin State University Professor of Art History

Grand Voyages is an exhibition of Piero Fenci’s smaller works. In reviewing Piero Fenci’s work more than a decade ago, it soon became evident that the artist expressed himself in life-affirming terms, a concern which he called the “anti-entropic imperative.” This imperative was the driving force behind his vision, and that body of work fully reveals the artist in prime form. Precise craftsmanship, highly original glazing techniques, and exquisitely balanced structural forms, characterize the series of Torre (Towers), Armadura (Armor), Sanctuario (Sancturies), Casco y Escudo (Helmet and Shield), and Muralla (Ramparts) that formed his La Cerce (The Fence) exhibition in 2010. Variously inspired by ancient Etruscan ceramics, Pre-Columbian kivas, Muramachi armor, Shaker hatboxes and tinware, and the Modernist ceramics of Picasso and Noguchi, these remarkable mid-career works embrace and celebrate widely diverse cultural traditions, and yet avoid cliché and appear unanticipatedly fresh and new. Moreover, in their seemingly impossible tectonics—a mélange of intersecting planes and globular forms—they not infrequently constitute small miracles of ceramic engineering: as daring in their way as the architecture of Frank Gehry. The wide compass of his vision and the underlying principle that guided it then remain fundamentally unchanged to the present. Yet the way Fenci expresses his vision most assuredly has changed, and in ways fully commensurate with the life-altering events that he has encountered (and anyone might anticipate) with increasing maturity.

Piero Fenci now enters a new phase. His new style embraces a smaller scale. His recent work is more playful in comparison with the architectonics of his previous work. Incrementally, he has come to emphasize the incidental and accidental aspects of clay in his art, relishing above all, the inherent beauty of the naturally flowing and puddling processes of glazed surfaces as they occur in a kiln firing. That new emphasis on “letting go” of control notwithstanding, Fenci’s work remains (as much as ever) both autobiographical and historical. Regarding his current practice, the artist writes: “my approach to making art is to take past and present archetypes that … draw me like a magnet, filter them through my psyche, and intuitively connect them. My work constitutes loosely rendered reinventions of my past; they are my attempt to build a family tree of spiritual ancestors, a heritage of my own passions.” [1] This “heritage of… passions,” this idea of connecting with the past and re-inventing it in the present, finds expression in Fenci’s current work, which he likens to Umberto Eco’s concept of semantic universals, engaging human awareness of bodily relationships in space and time in such familiar terms as “Up, down, left, right, the power of touch,”[2] and more complex corporeal sensibilities as: above, below, in front of, behind, beside. These sensorial perceptions of presence, of course, shape the way people see and respond to nature, as well as to art, from shifting vantage points in time and space. They also apply to our experience in dreams and nightmares—although sometimes in ways that defy the laws of the physical universe.

Exploring such elemental human experiences and consciousness is as compelling to the artist as giving creative form to raw clay and fired glaze.

Piero Fenci’s current work departs from the precise calculation and refinement of his previous practice, but the iconography remains familiar, if now more witty than elegant, more charming than refined, more toy-like than architectural in scale. For example, works from the Barges series clearly reference boat forms: rafts, hulls, portholes and hatches, masts, and sails, but always fragmented and abstracted to such a degree that, while they might be rocked back and forth, they couldn’t possibly float. They function as souvenirs or artifacts, surely inspired by Fenci’s many years of competitive sailing. Some acknowledge this nostalgic role by their placement upon raised platforms. Their toy-like scale recalls certain grave goods found in Ancient Egyptian tombs. Often employing strategies of cubist distortion and surreal displacement of imagery, like too highly positioned portholes, Fenci’s boat-like vessels defy expectation and, as such, encourage alternative ways of viewing them. Rather than suggesting the anticipated views of sea or dockside, the curiously displaced and too large portholes reveal the reality of the actual space around the physical objects they puncture—not a view of some imagined ocean or the derricks of a port, but the table and chair across the room, or of another visitor moving about the gallery. Some of the imagery seems vestigial: two bars across the top of a barge form might suggest seating or cargo secured to the bow or stern of the suggested vessel; but at this toy-like scale, they may be mistaken as handles for lifting the object from its base. Portholes may be placed too low or too high to function on an actual boat, but such absurdity engages the viewer with a sense of childlike wonder. Similarly, the “cookie-like” sail forms, trimmed from thick clay slabs, seem wholly unsuited for catching a breeze; ridiculous, raft-like half-boats are doomed to sink. While a toddler might dump juice out of a “sippy cup” so it will float in the bath, the toy boat forms presented here can only be destined for a place in Davy Jones’s Locker. The absurdity becomes complete, Piero Fenci wouldn’t have it any other way. In many of these works, a playful interplay of solids and voids leads the viewer’s eye to surprising reversals of perspective and expectation. It’s good to see through the unadulterated eyes of the child and renew one’s sense of wonderment.

David A. Lewis Valentines Day, 2023

Piero Fenci is professor of art/ceramics at Stephen F. Austin State University

Teapots, front to back

11 x 9 x 3, Courtesy of Catherine Oliver

12 x 10 x 5, Courtesy of Ritsuko Akamatsu

15 x 13 x 6, Courtesy of Catherine Oliver