Playing with Fire
A display of pieces by Axel Salto at the ‘Playing with Fire’ exhibition at the Kunstsilo, Norway
Edmund de Waal, ceramicist and writer, first came across Axel Salto’s glazed stoneware some decades ago, and the encounter was not especially promising. ’I was completely bewildered by these budding, sprouting vessels’, he said. Since then he has grown to admire them enthusiastically: ‘Axel Salto is one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century’, he recently wrote. ‘He created a unique body of ceramic work that continues to fascinate me. His sculptures seem to be on the point of change: glazes are caught in flux. Vases swell as if to burst. He cared about the ways that patterns change course, shift energies, how an animal becomes a person, a man metamorphoses into a stag. Ovid ran powerfully through his life. That moment of change, transformation, is the moment when poetry occurs’. He has also remarked that Salto is almost unknown in the contemporary art world, but although this is true, current prices of his work, which can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars, suggest that those who are familiar with and like his ceramics think very highly of them.
A sculptural potter and designer who studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen just before World War I, Salto subsequently spent time in Paris, where he became a member of a group of experimental artists, and on his return to Denmark he helped to establish a short-lived but influential art journal called ‘Klingen’, which provided a forum for the discussion of Modernism, both in theory and practice. Gradually changing his focus from painting to ceramics, he held that art should be part of interior design, to be shown alongside beautiful furniture and textiles, and in that light he also created fabrics, wallpaper, and books.
Salto’s pottery, often produced in small factory-made editions, moved away from traditional forms to vessels and sculpture that explored organic structure; his individual and baroque style contrasted dramatically with the plain functionalism that dominated design in the 1950s and 1960s, when 'Scandinavian Modern' was fashionable. Salto’s powerful pieces were inspired by natural forms, by the shapes of gourds, seed pods, buds, and opulent exotic fruits, all of them expressive of growth and movement. While his work occasionally echoes aspects of Art Nouveau and Jugendstil, which were early influences, they are generally possessed of an elemental strength that is sometimes disquieting.
The forcefulness in Axel Salto’s work was due to his fascination with the constant changes of nature and the vigour of their expansive movement. In his book Det Brændende Nu, published in 1938, Salto used the term, which can be translated as ‘the burning now’, to describe the specific moment when one thing turns into another, when a plant bulb breaks open or when, as described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, antlers penetrate Actaeon’s forehead as he becomes a stag. He used three categories to classify his work - fluted, budding and sprouting - the first two based on natural models, such as a chestnut's casing, an acorn, or a shell, and the third referring to what he called the 'miracle of growth', which reflected 'the pulsating life force that springs out of nature’. They are not always easy to distinguish. Salto was also enthralled by the changes and transformation of ceramics in the heat of the kiln, as well their makers’ restless sense of anticipation and anxiety as it is opened.
De Waal has curated ‘Playing with Fire’, an extensive travelling exhibition of Salto’s work and his own, which is soon to end its tour at the Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire. At first glance, there may seem to be little in common between the Danish artist’s deeply physical vessels, often covered in rich and smouldering glazes, and the curator’s small porcelain pieces, exquisite and finely wrought, whose beauty and effect depend on subtle shifts in emphasis and energy, but as de Waal has pointed out, they share interests in the meaning and emotional value of objects and materiality, which they have both expressed in ceramics and writing. While there can be no doubt that he has a deep sense of empathy with Salto, the contrast between them is nonetheless striking.
According to de Waal, his aspiration is not simplicity or purity but something quite different. In his book, The White Road, he writes about the beauty of porcelain being pursued at any cost, ever since it was first made in China over a thousand years ago, warning of the ‘dangers of an obsession with white, the pull towards something so pure’ that it seems to exist beyond morality. There are traces of that obsessiveness in de Waal’s work and installations; below their graceful surfaces they are single-minded and uncompromising. Perhaps it is there that the two artists meet: the conjunction of Salto’s fierce vitalism with de Waal’s intense refinement may be surprising, but it is also compelling.
For further exploration:
https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2023/08/24/essay-axel-salto-playing-with-fire/
https://www.sothebys.com/en/digital-catalogues/axel-salto-the-burning-now
https://www.edmunddewaal.com/#
Current listening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnZjGJfik4o&list=OLAK5uy_nqsoHmE71z1SS4z-Jkodm9Mbp-Fhw5_JA&index=8
Image on index page: a selection of the work of Axel Salto, photographed at the ‘Playing with Fire’ exhibition in the Kunstsilo, Norway
Edmund de Waal, untitled (an exchange of territory, or world), 2023, porcelain, silver, aluminum, and glass, 15 × 19 ¾ × 4 inches (38 × 50 × 10 cm) © Edmund de Waal. Photo: Alzbeta Jaresova