About the Exhibition.

TMR presents its fourth exhibition in its TMR Guadalajara series. For this installment, Los Angeles-based artist Brian Rochefort completed a residency at Cerámica Suro—Guadalajara’s renowned ceramic and art fabrication workshop. During the residency, Rochefort completed an experimental body of work that marks a radically distinct shift from his current practice. The works, his largest in scale to date, will debut to mark his first solo exhibition in Latin America.

Rochefort’s practice responds to the experience of travel, including excursions into natural habitats around the world. When he returns to the studio, he channels his encounters with geologically extreme phenomena and formations into a unique approach to ceramics. Breaking the rules of traditional technique, each piece is the culmination of an intimate and improvisational process of addition and subtraction carried out over multiple rounds of glazing and firing.  The final results recall, in miniature, the paradoxical landscape of the volcanoes and geysers that inspire them: both matte and glossy, wet and cracked, collapsing and emerging. These works embody the in-between beauty of matter and form at its physical limits.

For Cerámica Azul, his exhibition at TMR Guadalajara, Rochefort brings together travel and production for the first time.  Combining the technical and aesthetic possibilities that emerged from his time working at Cerámica Suro, Rochefort introduces new vocabularies of scale, form, and texture to his practice. The austere grandiosity of the setting inspired a more minimalist, even classical approach to form, while industrial kilns made possible vessels that expand beyond the dimensions Rochefort usually works within.  Finished in shades of blue, green, and purple, they represent a more complete coming-together of the human production and natural creations in Rochefort’s objects, as though they were industrial remnants made to cohabitate with the iconic magueys in the fertile volcanic plains of Jalisco.