John Bauer

JOHN BAUER, BY LLOYD POLLAK

 John Bauer, who humbly dubs himself ‘John the potter’, is among the most inventive and original ceramacists at work in the world today and his work graces many a national and international collections. His hallmark is a horror of the conventional and a flair for daredevil experiment. The freakishly outlandish, the bizarre, the droll, the whimsical, the lyrical, the poetic and above all, the breathtakingly beautiful, all emerge from his kiln.

Post mortem typifies the darker side of his oeuvre. It is like an apparition – a ghoulish specter emanating from the beyond. John takes Durer’s famous self-portrait in a furred coat and transforms it into a terrifying piece of macabrerie, more like a corpse than a living being. The cadaverous face, set features and fixed gaze suggest that rigor mortis has already set in. The white areas around the cheeks, nose, lips and eyelids evoke decomposition: the holes in the cranium gunshot wounds. Here John the master magician accomplishes something that has never been accomplished before. He uses porcelain as a painter uses oil paint.

He applies Durer’s image to his plaque using translucent oil paint laying layer upon layer upon layer. First comes chrome green (an unpleasant sort of dark olive green), then a blackish gray, then white, then bright cobalt blue and then a final layer of white. John’s groundbreaking innovation is that the white is a composite: it is part photographic negative and part oil paint. The brain has one language for reading photographic negatives and another for reading oil painting but it cannot read both at the same time. The result is that the mind is forced to resort to two languages simultaneously. This it is not equipped to do, and in this process the blues and greens disappear and everything - except the white - is perceived as various shades of a single dark color.  Such is John’s chemical chiromancy!

John’s preoccupation with Durer developed into an obsession and this inspired him to create what he calls ‘the Durer illusionist tiles’. Each tile contains two entirely separate and unrelated images, but only one is visible. Which one is seen depends on the proximity or distance from which the tile is viewed, the angle of vision and the prevailing luminary conditions, be they bright sunshine, dark shadow or sullen overcast skies. Perhaps the best illustration of this is John’s broken bat tile. 

The bat is inescapably present. It stands proud of the surface catching the light and casting shadows. The viewer probably dismisses the left hand side of the tile as a mere mottled green background for the bat, but something nags and tugs at the eye. And Lo and behold if you shift your gaze to the left, you will see the hair, head, eyes nose and mouth of the great Renaissance master. The conjunction of the dead bat (a symbol of night) and Durer’s baleful stare create an eyrie feeling for it is as if Durer were staring at us from beyond the grave.

It is difficult to see both images simultaneously. If you gaze at the bat, Durer drops out of sight, and if you look at Durer you forget the bat. At the time that John fashioned these Durer tiles he was experimenting with colours, fabrics and textures. He sought to create the most lush and luxuriant of effects by using crumpled fabrics of the costliest sort to create sumptuous surface patterns that uplift the viewer and inspire a sense of celebration. Swirl one is a green tile imprinted with rich and splendid whirligig patterning that tends to entrance the eye and conduct it hither and thither in all sorts of different directions. Tilt the tile to the right angle in deep shadow and Durer’s head looms out. It is impossible to see this and the crushed textile patterns at the same time. It is a case of either one or the other.

Durer is far more difficult to discern in the equally gorgeous Swirl three. John who is a fine theoretician explains: ”Your eye cannot find Durer, but your unconscious mind constructs him within your brain especially if you have already seen him in the Broken bat and Swirl one tiles. He is seen in your memory rather than your visual cortex. Your perceptions function rather like subliminal advertising where you see, but don’t recollect what you have seen.”