Fernando Casasempere: Moon LightSep 13 – Nov 9, 2024

An exploration of the earth – the ground beneath our feet – and the human imprint upon it, the work of the Chilean artist, Fernando Casasempere, kneads together geology and archaeology, history and memory, industry and the natural world.

The mineral makeup of his home country – rich in resources and diverse in composition – has been an important element of Casasempere’s work, as the artist has made his own clays using the raw material of the land – his land - from the very beginning of his career. The size, scale and power of the Chilean landscape, a country with an undeniably sculptural quality, has also exerted an influence; his visual language shaped by the drama of its terrain, a place shaped by volcanoes and frequent earthquakes, a home to both glaciers and deserts, bound between the heights of the Andean mountains and the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

In 2022, the San Diego Museum of Art presented Terra – a culmination of two decades of research, a coming-together of the ideas that are at the core of the artist’s practice, namely the reciprocal relationship between the planet and humanity; the extraction and depletion of the earth’s resources; the marks that we make and the objects that we leave behind, buried under the surface, to be unearthed hundreds of years after their making.

In the same year, there was a site-specific show at the London Mithraeum/Bloomberg Space titled Scratching the Surface. Hulking blocks of clay, striated with writhing layers and topped with a thin crust – like geological samples or models of the earth’s composition – were presented alongside artefacts that had been recently excavated from the archaeological site beneath the exhibition space itself.

Both presentations focused on the environmental, political and historical aspects of Casasempere’s practice - however, 2022 also brought about a nomination for the Loewe Craft Prize in recognition of the artist’s on-going research into his chosen material, his technical brilliance and dedication to the continuation of his craft. A celebration of the poetry of making something - something so refined, so sensitive - from the simplest of means.

A challenging material, clay is prone to fluctuations and breakages, it may sink or collapse, shrink or crack, but artists are drawn to it for this very reason – the constant challenge that it poses to its maker. A recent series by Casasempere expands the conception of clay, as well as stretching the artist’s own fluency with it: moving from three dimensions to two, the ‘Salares’ are clay paintings whose flat, air-dried surfaces describe the dry, arid conditions of the desert, or a planet too hot, or too cold, to inhabit.

Informed by the salt flats in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile – large planes of wondrous, rough, crystalline structures - these works are atypical in both their form and execution. A technical and physical departure for the artist, these works also mark a conceptual shift, as Casasempere looks across the earth’s surface, instead of down into its depths; and the latest pieces from the series are a further re-calibration, as he turns gaze upwards, towards the sky – pondering our place within an even larger and more complex system.

A meditation on the moon, and the blue-silver glow it casts on everything beneath it, the inky surfaces recall the mottled lunar terrain, with its familiar highlights and lowlights. Describing not only the topography of the moon, these ‘paintings’ perfectly portray its lustre as it moves through its many phases.

Achieving a rich, dense black, their darkness should be understood not as the opposite of light, but as its own quality of light. “The moon lives in the lining of your skin,” notes the poet Pablo Neruda – a faint, watery sheen. The same, slow light rests upon the stoneware sculptures, their faces and facets picked out of the dark as if through a haze – their presence like that of a large object, observed from afar.

Capturing the clay between its raw state and its final state, the series of ‘Pebble Meteorites’ offers an insight into Casasempere’s process – how the separate elements come together, how the artist folds and kneads, how the material is stretched and compressed, swirling with a complex of coloured minerals. These small chunks of matter demand up-close observation, scientific study, each piece a world unto itself.

With this new body of work, Fernando Casasempere speaks of the earth and the moon, of what is here and there – and the unknown spaces between and beyond.