I’m having another of my periodic staring matches with the pottery at the Pucker Gallery while straining to hear what it’s trying to tell me. “Center of centers, kernel of kernels,/almond that’s locked itself up and is growing sweet —/this entire universe as far as the stars/is the flesh of your fruit: I bow to you.” It might seem odd that the work of Japanese artist Noriyasu Tsuchiya should speak in the German tongue of Rainer Maria Rilke, but then the poem it’s quoting from is titled “Buddha in Glory,” and anyway no one has ever understood the thingness of things the way Rilke did. “Nothing can spoil for him [Orpheus] the valid image,” he explains in the Sonnets to Orpheus, “be it from graves, be it from rooms/praise finger ring, clasp, and jug.”

Rilke stretched the concept of poetry; Tsuchiya stretches the concept of pottery. His forms are traditional, and the objects he produces are household items: plates, bowls, pitchers, vases, teapots, teabowls, sake cups. But they find new ways to arrive at holding, pouring, and sustaining. The piece I started talking to (NT59) is a stoneware pitcher with an ash glaze. As Tsuchiya pieces go, it’s pretty conventional: squat shape with a bulge in the middle, nondescript handle, suggestion of a spout. The upper area of the bulge, though, is defined by a dozen or so incised horizontal lines, and then there’s the glaze, which flows down from the top like caramel, ending neatly a few inches from the bottom so you can appreciate the contrast with the unglazed stoneware. Looking as if it had been sculpted from a block of earth, its glaze insinuating the mysteries of Lascaux, this pitcher gives weight to Rilke’s suggestion that perhaps we’re here “just to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window . . . ” It’s as simple and essential as a pitcher can get.

But it’s just one Tsuchiya pitcher. A dark brown model (NT46), iron over wax-resist brushwork (the wax resisting the glaze and leaving a whitish pattern), suggests a pregnant fig. Another iron-glazed pitcher (NT15) looks clunky in the catalogue, fat and stocky and with ugly curved ribs, but when I pick it up it vibrates softly, as if empathing the logic of those curves to me; I put it down wistfully. Same experience with the concave-lens-shaped iron-over-wax-resist-brushwork pitcher (NT48): unremarkable in two dimensions, appealing in three. A copper-green-over-wax-resist-brushwork pitcher (NT57), this one shaped more like a jug, feels as cool as it looks.

Tsuchiya’s plates are his most idiosyncratic items. The round ones range from cream with tiny green and brown dots (NT18) to ash glaze that looks like a hazel-and-green eye with a brown border (NT80) to one with painted iron and cobalt and a trio of wax-resist-brushed characters that look like the answer to some Big Question (NT26). There are square plates with wavy borders: yellow copper with green dots (NT84), painted iron with more wax-resist characters (NT27), high-gloss chestnut with a wide cream border and a decorated surface that suggests beansprouts (NT17). The same technique in green turns up in an octagonal plate (NT19). Two big porcelain plates (NT33 and 34) have underglazed copper, again the Answer motif.

A flat vase with brushed white slip (NT58) could, depending on how you look at the world, remind you of the cosmos in its milky swirls or a bowl of fudge ripple. A pair of red vases (NT49 and 50) have been fired with straw tied around them; they look like holocaust survivors. The flat flower pot with lugs has a blue-gray swirl pattern that conjures the background of the 1889 Van Gogh self-portrait that’s in the Louvre. Two bowls, one iron, one copper green (NT 69 and 70), have asymmetrical lips; two small plates with feet, one green, one yellow (NT72 and 99), enjoy a shiny glaze that seems bottomless.

I’m back to staring and bowing, this time at Tsuchiya’s sake cups, which are all rough and ready and one of a kind. “For way up there your suns grow/full and, glowing, make their rounds,” Rilke says to his Buddha. “But in you there has already begun/what will outlast them.”

Issue Date: May 31- June 7, 2001