KEN EASTMAN

Barrett-Marsden Gallery, London EC1

9 June- 29 July

Some ceramic artists feel that their works aspire to the condition of poetry. Often this is no more than a poetic title, a lyrical addendum to raise the tone of a piece already completed, a reference to something obscure. With some rare people, though, you get the sense of a life immersed in poetry, and of a way of working that has the concentration that reminds you of poetry. Like Elizabeth Fritsch's exhibitions, Ken Eastman's radiate this feeling that source material, literary, sensory and visual have been quarried, sifted and condensed into a small number of pieces that talk to each other and resonate like lyrics across a poetry collection. This means that his exhibitions are events to look forward to as considered works in themselves, and to look back on as discrete events. In his last major show at the Angel Row Gallery in Nottingham he had shown a series of' cutouts', a quixotic foray into the shadows made by forms inspired by the workbench. Where he would move from these pieces was intriguing - would he move further into the toolbox, further into the picture plane?

Eastman's latest exhibition at the Barrett Marsden Gallery threw expectations satisfactorily: it consisted of nine tall vessels. They were constructed from slabbed pieces of clay, but these were not the slabs that made up the cut-out series. They bent and oscillated into shallow curves, giving the sense of pressure coming from the inside, of barely contained volumes rather than rigid structures. Each piece was a compound of different or conflicting volumes, rather than a central accessible space. Some had barely accessible volumes within the vessel, one had an open niche on the 'outside' of the piece, one was lifted off the ground to give a glimpse of another hidden space. There was a constant play between what you could see and the hermetic. This is something that they share with the buildings of Frank Gehry, an architect that Eastman evidently feels some kinship with, the radical disposition of spaces to make movement within a structure a series of discoveries and explorations, not the straightforward ownership of a disclosed space. The American critic Rosalind Krauss, writing on contemporary museums, could be describing an Eastman piece when she mentions '…the sudden opening in the wall of a given gallery to allow a glimpse of a faraway object. .. the pierced partition, the open balcony, the interior window circulation in these museums is as much visual as physical... a constant “decentering" through the pull of something else.' This constant ‘decentering’ sounds rather tiring, a post-modern trick to keep you on your toes. But the experience of standing in front of one of these pieces is quite the reverse: your eye does travel constantly, you are made to move around the piece to follow shadows and lines and ledges, but it produces a kind of meditative reverie. You begin to acknowledge the different architectural analogies - the way that the compound slabs end at the top of the piece to produce skylines for instance - while moving on. In this way Eastman's work is very successful: it does not make the viewer a prisoner to the influences behind it. These are not Bilbao Guggenheims slabbed up in a Herefordshire studio.

Eastman's colour-sense is different from any other ceramic artist I can think of. There are some affinities, in the leached-out tonalities to the greys, pinks and yellows of old plaster walls. Or so I thought: here were colours straight out of a 50s Cadillac catalogue - a mauve that must surely be a first for the austerities of the Barrett-Marsden. And it wasn't just the new colours, but their conjunctions that were so startling: there is an unmistakeable sense that Ken Eastman is enjoying himself. And he has a good line in titles too.