Animated Matter

Working in the medium of ceramics is a new development within the already rich oeuvre of Marc Mulders, which spans a period of more than forty years. Just as with his other work, his ceramics could, on the one hand, be interpreted as a spiritual quest for deeper meanings. On the other, it is a result of his ever-enduring curiosity and urge to innovate.

Not only is the search for spatiality new for his work and his way of working – though his stained-glass windows can be considered an orchestration of light and color in space, and his oil paintings are characterized by a great stratification and sculptural quality – it moreover requires a totally different approach; the modelling, proportioning and then the mixing of glazes demand other skills.

Ultimately, working in ceramics could be conceived as a deeper quest for the animate force of the elements: earth, water, fire and air. These not only constitute the physical basis of the medium of ceramics, but also provide an in-depth spiritual level in Mulders's work and way of working. He approaches clay, in fact, not as neutral matter, but as a carrier of transformation – a medium in which the earthly and the divine meet.

Four elements

A historic echo of this approach can be found in the work of the 16th-century French ceramist Bernard Palissy (1510-1590). He regarded ceramics as a means by which to fathom nature's creative processes.

In those days people believed that life could arise spontaneously from pools of mud, rotting carcasses and other muck. Palissy experimented with glazes and casts of animals and plants in order to make visible and palpable the mysterious forms of life that had spontaneously generated from the dark corners of the earth.

For Palissy, rotting was no end point; it marked, in fact, the start of new life. He considered it a cyclical process in which elements worked together to give shape to the existence and generation of life. The ceramic medium was, for him, the ideal means by which to perceive and grasp this process. Through the use of the four elements in the creative process – earth and water (wet clay), air and fire (drying processes and firing in the kiln) – it was possible, in Palissy's view, to study and come as close as possible to these mystical processes; he saw ceramics as the conveyor of existential forces.

The ceramics of Mulders have a similarly deeper meaning. His works could be viewed as ritual objects in which matter and spiritual mysticism converge. It is an exercise in focus and inspiration, in which the elements not only take shape, are the creative force behind his work, but also hold more profound connotations.

In addition to this, Palissy's approach shares distinctly common ground with the broader themes in Mulders's work in which the elements and the seasons – the cycle of growth, blossom and decay – play an important role. His studio on the country estate Baest, near Oirschot, is surrounded by meadows of wildflowers that are situated in a wooded environment. This is the direct source of inspiration for his work. In spring and summer he paints with the scent of flowers in mind, in autumn and winter with the longing for new life: cycles that are directly translated into his ceramic work. The swift strokes in the ceramics suggest continual movement.

Bearers of light

The most physical and probing works from Mulders's ceramic series are the 'Amulets', three large suspended monumental shapes, all of which refer emphatically to an early theme in his work: the monumental slaughtered ox. In Mulders's early paintings from the 1980s and 90s, dead animals play a key role. At Cor Unum Mulders modelled a number of carcass-like structures and gave them openings in which fragments of glass have been placed. Hung from ropes, they are situated in front of a source of light, causing the light to be cast through the openings in which stained glass has been placed. This work brings together the earthly and the spiritual; the body, marked by death, becomes the bearer of light.

Mulders's decision to use the motif of the slaughtered ox is deeply rooted in art history. It goes back to Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), whose painting Slaughtered Ox (ca. 1655) offers a raw yet honest view of the dead animal as a symbol of mortality.

Rembrandt portrays the carcass not as something terrifying, but as a monument to the life that is over – an almost spiritual confrontation with the finite. While Mulders was already fascinated by this metaphor during his early years, he now transforms this image into a spatial form, in which the body is not only visible but also literally broken open in order to allow light in.

The French expressionist Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943) is also an important source of inspiration in the early work of Mulders. His series of slaughtered oxen, painted in the 1920s, is suffused with color, movement and emotion. Soutine's oxen seem to pulse with life. The paint is layered, tactile, and the forms are distorted as the dead flesh almost seems to glow. Mulders shares Soutine's fascination with the body as an expressive medium – as a place where the beauty of the transitory and the eternal merge. Death marks the transition from the temporal to the eternal. While Soutine shaped paint, Mulders now does so with clay as well: the flesh, the tendons and the ribs become tangible, sculptural, and are ultimately made radiant by the light cast through stained glass and translucent layers of glaze.

The light cast through the amulets also connects directly to the stained-glass windows that Mulders created for various churches. Here the incoming light symbolizes hope and transformation – the light that banishes darkness. In the paintings that he produces at Landgoed Baest, light plays a similar role: the petals of flowers in meadows that surround his studio light up against the shade of the forest edge. Like stained glass in a rose window, they are, for Mulders, a reference to the transformation of the earthly into the celestial.

Life, death and rebirth

The life cycle has, as mentioned, considerable importance in the work of Mulders, which comes about in harmony with nature. One of the most symbolic motifs in his oeuvre is the ouroboros – a snake that eats its own tail. It is among the oldest mythical symbols in the world. The ouroboros represents the endless cycle of life, death and rebirth – a cycle moreover deeply embedded in Christianity.

Mulders recently created a series of watercolors related to this theme. Here the ouroboros functions as a visual and spiritual anchor point for his thoughts on transitoriness and transformation. In his ceramic work this symbol now becomes three-dimensional and palpable. The snake feeds and devours itself, and thereby makes up a closed system – an image of nature, of the universe and of the human soul. Due to the use of clay and glaze, this philosophical concept assumes an earthly form. The mirror held in place by the snake's body makes the viewer a participant in this cycle.

In the ceramic Ouroboros, this cycle literally comes to life. The work is not only a symbol of eternity, but of hope as well: life that will always continue and renew itself. Because of its reflective surface and open form, it invites contemplation – a resting point, a moment of meditation and reflection in today's world, which often moves too fast.

Suffering and redemption

Aside from the Amulets and the Ouroboroses, Mulders has created a series of ceramic crucifixes. These works allude to Christian iconography but, in his hands, become in fact rugged, earthly and palpable. The crosses are therefore not smooth or exalted, but rather bear the visible traces of the creative process. They are imperfect, human. The suffering of Christ is not depicted as an exalted and serene process, but is instead made tangible by Mulders.

In these crucifixes there is also an echo of work by Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) and Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), two postwar artists who redefined art and age-old art-historical themes, each in his own way. Practically at the same time (in the period just after 1945 and in the early 1950s) they made several series of crucifixes: Fontana in glazed ceramics, Beuys initially in bronze and later with perishable materials including wood, fat, cloth and felt.

What the two artists also shared was their abandonment of the rigid cross form as a visually defining feature. In his later crucifix sculptures from the 1950s, Fontana allows the body of Christ and even the cross to disintegrate entirely into free forms and expressive colors. While the cross form was a determining factor during the early years, Fontana's focus shifted increasingly toward the corpus Christi as a sculptural experiment. A prelude to his quest for spatiality and the infinite in what he called concetti spaziali, spatial concepts. He hereby transformed a purely religious object into a cosmic experience, in which movement, abstraction and the use of bright colors played a key role. In the work of Fontana, the earthly quality of the clay and the reflections of light on the smooth, voluptuous – baroque – and richly glazed surface can be considered a reference to a transition from the earthly to the celestial. The crucifixes become abstract, almost psychedelic experiences, stripped of a strictly religious connotation.

In the series of bronze Sonnenkreuze (sun crosses) that Beuys produced during the late 1940s – for which he took much inspiration from (profane) examples from classical antiquity and the early Middle Ages – there is, just as with Fontana's later crucifixes, no cross form to be discerned. We see the body of Christ with raised arms and, above that, an abstracted radiant sun. The Sonnenkreuz thus becomes a powerful and universal image in which suffering and redemption are central, reinforced by the upward movement of the body of Christ. The earthly and the celestial are brought together; and due to the removal of the cross, the idea of gravity has vanished as the corpus seems to float in space. Because there is no cross, Sonnenkreuz loses part of its religious meaning related to Christianity. This makes it open to inner reflection, personal transformation and interpretation.

Although the two artists worked with different materials – Fontana with ceramics and Beuys with bronze – they both suggest the mystical processes of transformation and transfiguration. While Fontana did this by way of form and color, quick finger movements in the wet clay and substantial layers of glaze, Beuys cast this in bronze. Bronze in its unpolished form: the residue of sediment left in the casting mold sometimes still visibly present. The monumental character of bronze is negated by this raw patina, making it physical and tangible. This rawness contrasts sharply with the ethereal process suggested by Beuys: transformation and a transition from the earthly to the celestial.

In the work of Fontana and Beuys there are great similarities to the crucifixes created by Mulders during his work period at Cor Unum. These works likewise draw on Christian iconography, but have a universal character at the same time. In the hands of Mulders the crucifixes become raw, earthly and palpable. They are not smooth or exalted, but are imperfect and bear the visible traces of the creative process. The suffering and the transfiguration of Christ are not depicted as something sublime but are, on the contrary, made tangible. This is heightened by a circle of rolled-out clay that acts as a kind of protective cloak draped around the frail, highly abstracted corpus.

By portraying the cross not as a static symbol, but in fact as a sculptural and living body, scarred and translucent, the crucifixes of Mulders are, like those of Fontana and Beuys, open to a multitude of interpretations. The cross becomes a place of transition, where the material and the spiritual meet.

Trinity

Although, on initial consideration, the Ouroboroses, the crucifixes and the Amulets follow separate thematic lines, in their essence they are profoundly linked with each other and deeply rooted in (art) history. In each work Mulders investigates, entirely in his own way, the tension between matter, form and meaning. In doing so he creates a field of tension between the earthly and the transcendent, the temporal and the eternal.

While the Ouroboros works refer to the never-ending cycle of life, this is true of Mulders's crucifixes as well. They are an example of suffering and redemption, the death and resurrection of Christ. The slaughtered ox symbolizes the body as a place of transformation – the transition from life to death. Just as Christ was shackled, tortured and brutally nailed to the cross, we discern in the image of the slaughtered ox a similar sense of suffering and complete surrender – vulnerable and helpless, like the fragile material with which it has been made.

The ouroboros, the crucifixes and the slaughtered ox jointly comprise a trinity in which Mulders's fascination with light, mortality and spirituality takes shape. When the impasto clay is given various layers of glaze in multiple phases of firing, a lively visual language arises – a lively and inspired one – in which the earthly and the mystical merge. In Mulders's hands the sculptures are gradually stripped of their religious context, stripped of their traditional iconographic framework, and are thereby made open to interpretation. By observing and sensing, we slowly acquire a deeper understanding of the underlying meanings of these objects. An intangible new world of mysticism and transcendence is gradually revealed to the viewer.

To Mulders, working in the medium of ceramics means returning to his artistic roots, but also taking a new step within his oeuvre. It is a further exploration of what art can be in a world that yearns for meaning as never before.