In “Mesmerchandize,’’ a yellow glaze, cracked to reveal orange beneath, covers another crumpled, biomorphic shape. Pink frilly curtains open onto a cavity painted rich red. A blue, drop-shaped pendant dangles from a turquoise chain embedded in the surface. Nothing so gorgeous was ever invented.
“Figuring Color,’’ the show these works and 26 others by Butterly appear in, is terrific. Organized by the ICA’s Jenelle Porter, it features four artists: two women, two men, three of them in their 40s or 50s. (The fourth, Félix González-Torres, died in 1996 at 38.)
Bright and lively, it’s a perfect winter show for the ICA, and a sop for those seeking relief from the varieties of conceptual minimalism that tend to hold court there. Strolling past works by Sue Williams and Butterly, in particular, you may feel as Edgar Degas did in front of the paintings of Gustave Courbet: nuzzled by the wet nose of a calf.
Most of the works are tactile and full of sensuous entreaty (although in truth, the two male artists, Roy McMakin and González-Torres, properly belong back in the conceptual-minimalist camp). But, diverting as much of it is, I’m afraid Butterly, who is 48 and lives in New York, rather steals the show.
Her works are 3-D - in the actual, not the virtual sense. You don’t need silly glasses to grasp the way their surfaces fold, bend, crumple, and twist. Colors and textures change at a prodigious rate as our eyes pass over them.
Besides being witty, erotic, and technically virtuosic, these little ceramics - many of them the product of 20 to 30 visits to the kiln - have the great benefit of being philosophically modest. In contrast to, say, those other self-trumpeting colorists, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, they have no extracurricular agenda.
