FotoFile | Brian Rochefort’s Winning March Across Europe arrives in Greece

MILAN + ATHENS—Brian Rochefort is having an amazing run. His exhibition at Perhaps An Asteroid Hit, Massimo De Carlo, Milan, is his seventh in a row to totally sell out, unsurprisingly given the seductive old-world crystal chandelier decadence of the show’s venue. And now in his march across Europe, with having had shows in Brussels, Venice, London and Milan, he is poised for his eighth triumph in Greece, Stellar Games, (April 3 – May 20, 2021) at The Bernier/Eliades Gallery with a body of work that is arguably his best ever. 

Rochefort, the Gallery notes, uses ceramic and glazes to create arresting ceramic sculptures that suggest forms or phenomena in the natural world. Each work is built up of layers of mud and slip clay, which the artist repeatedly breaks and builds back meticulously over a period of time, and then fires, airbrushes, and glazes – over multiple firings, or as the artist enthuses, “as many glazes as possible until I can’t fire anymore.”

All of Brian Rochefort’s works and their titles, are based on traveling to remote areas around the world, such as the Bolivian Amazon, the Serengeti in Tanzania, and the Choco Cloud Forest in Ecuador among so many other places. Also protected barrier reefs in Africa and the Galapagos Islands.

The title to most of his shows is a product of doomsday scenarios. 
 
His new show “Stellar Gems”, at Bernier / Eliades Gallery, follows the Milan theme in describing in chaotic debris that is the aftermath of a fictitious comet or asteroid that hits the planet.

“My sculptures look alien, exotic, from outer space or from the depths of the ocean. 
I want the viewer to sense these objects are extraordinary, from the future or from the past. My goal is to make sculptures that look chaotic and broken yet controlled and beautiful with vibrant colors and textures that nod to Ab-Ex artists like Franz West and Wilhelm DeKooning.”