In tiny ceramic compositions, Ron Nagle conjures infinite imaginary worlds. The American sculptor, who has been ploughing the same dreamy, psychedelic, hyper-colour furrow since the 1960s, creates small things (none bigger than 16cm) to make you think big.
The little ceramics here look like alien rock formations, lunar landscapes, volcanic eruptions on desert planes, modernist houses, perfectly surreal French pastries and furniture for extra terrestrials.
Each one is a world unto itself. Some look like adobe brick houses plonked on purple desert floors, others feature impossibly undulating geological features, like mountains curving up into the sky. There are branches of driftwood, globs of lava, sinkholes and menhirs.
Nagle toys brilliantly with texture. There’s all this sandy roughness and rocky grit that then gets splooged over with perfect, slimy, shiny smoothness. He plays with perspective and size too. If the house by the water is ‘human’ size in this universe, then how huge is that abandoned branch? How vast is that mountain? How enormous is that chair?
They’re unreal, beautiful, mind-bending, cosmic micro-worlds, full of nods to brutalism and deserts and the spaces that bodies inhabit, or could inhabit in some ideal future, on some distant planet, on Nagleworld. They’re gorgeous -universes you desperately want to inhabit. Shrink me down, beam me in, I want to live here.
