Yuki Horiki and Claudine Marzik
The artworks in Dialogue pervaded the gallery with harmonious and silent 'conversation'. Ceramic forms found counterparts in abstracted shapes on canvas, colours complemented, interaction was serene. Too serene? Did the easy grace of this show become problematic?
Yuki Horiki and Claudine Marzik's new works were explicit in their 'mutual admiration', and if such a foundation were the only rationale for these artists exhibiting together, the effect would have been too cloying, too aesthetically coordinated. Fortunately, many of Marzik's acrylic paintings on canvas (all untitled) militated against this threat and made clear statements in her own language of abstraction. The reverse also applies: Horiki's sculptured ceramic vessels were mostly singular quirky objects that could live in isolation.
Horiki is also a painter and her previous exhibition, Life Vessel, 1997, at Cairns Regional Gallery, combined figurative imagery with her first ceramic explorations. She proved to be an ingenue of three-dimensions with her particularly inventive vases. New works in Dialogue were more austere, and their minimal colour allowed purity of form to dominate. Groupings of creamy, single-stem cylinders, in threes and fives, themselves called Dialogue, were sculptures but also worked as graphic vertical sketches in clay, like maquettes. Vicissitudes were twenty arum lily shapes (or wall -vases not for flowers) and likewise were effective as a group.
Horiki's pieces were few, a seemingly calculated choice since their simplicity of form proclaimed 'less is more'. Her four burnished Ha Za Ma vessels were large sensual bellies with the lips of jugs. The most accomplished of all her pieces, Cloud Vessel, was aptly named with its subtle scalloped opening.
A group of eight untitled paintings by Marzik were toned in the same soft