MILAN JOHANNES PETERS
AVAilable pieces
about
Lives and works in Kirchzarten, Germany
Johannes Peters is well known for his work of utilitarian pieces with cobalt decoration reduced to the essential. He is less known for his shaped pieces. However, my first encounter with his work was when I met a narrow and long dish that ended with two handles. Made in his usual sandstone, it was covered with a white slip animated with a few drops of cobalt blue and a layer of colorless enamel. Everything in this piece spoke the language of simplicity : whether it be the work of the handles similar to the imprint of the artist's hands in the still fresh earth, the drops as if thrown randomly on the background, the very imprint of Johannes's thumb to the reverse trapped in the earth and in the enamel. What was in that piece to hold one's gaze? This simplicity or should I write this pseudo simplicity because, like a fable by La Fontaine that seems to have been wrote in one go, this cake dish seemed to have been made by any of us.
But how many hours of work did it take to master these simple gestures? So that the hands leave the exact trace necessary for gripping the dish but also to ensure that their visual balance is perfect? So that the few drops of cobalt sufficiently animate the object?
There is no such dish here, but pieces with slender shapes that take over the three engobes with which the artist works - colorless, cream and honey - covered with transparent enamel, rare traces of cobalt here and there, but above all the subtle interplay of the thicknesses of some and others, which allow the materials to vibrate by transparency, by superposition...
And each piece tells how it became a plate, a bowl, a box, a vase from the earth ball worked with bare hands, stretched on the fly like a cake dough with its possible variations in thickness or even its bulges. The matter then becomes either a plate, or rolls up on itself, collapses a little by widening, swells under the pressure of the hand of which it keeps the mark, is sewn by pinches, some of which yield to drying and then leave gaps that the enamel hardly seals. Because it is not the function that the artist is looking for but the form, a form that memorizes all the stages of its creation up to the application of the slip and enamel.
And so the drips, while testifying to the enamelling, become decoration and even ballet on the vase with ears of the invitation card, ballet of the artist's hands grasping the piece and turning it for the various stages of its decoration while the drips mingle like a choreography that would slow down its writing in space.
Deprived of all pentimenti, the works are there, immobile in their fake simplicity, whose unaffected elegance testifies the artist's perfect mastery.
Eric Berthon
