Wayne Cardinalli

GARY MICHAEL DAULT
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, August 1, 2009 Review Section, Page R10
Wayne Cardinalli at the David Kaye Gallery

$350-$1,700. Until Aug. 23, 1092 Queen St. W., Toronto; 416-532-9075

The Black Nail Projects is a tiny exhibition of almost indecently exuberant ceramic works by Mississauga-based artist Wayne Cardinalli. Given their kinetic bravado, it seems insufficiently celebratory merely to call them “vessels,” though Cardinalli insists that he is not a sculptor. “I make pots,” he tells me, with a certain self-deprecating finality. He says this in response to my seeing a work such as Covered Jar with Wing – a richly empurpled, chocolate brown, caramel-esque vessel that looks as if it has done time in a wind tunnel – as an evocation of, or homage to the maniacal Italian Futurists (Umberto Boccioni could have made this thing in 1912). He says he can see the connection, but doesn’t want to stress it. “The pieces are staunchly vessels,” he insists.
The work making up The Black Nail Projects came out of an unfortunate accident a year and a half ago, when Cardinalli caught his finger in a car door. It soon became impossible for him to work on his potter’s wheel (“I’m mostly a thrower,” he says – as in throwing pots). So, as he watched his fingernail turn black, he took to “slab-work and hand-building,” which is to say he started to make things without turning them on a wheel. “It opened up whole new avenues of energies for me,” he says, including the providing of a sudden new venue for a vast collection of metal stamps from Indonesia, which, hitherto unused, he began to press into the wet clay. He also added curious and exciting wing-like rushes of clay that seem to give each of these pieces a hectic vitality. Cardinalli seems utterly determined to resist any new stance for himself as a fine artist. “These are Frankenpots,” he says, a bit anticlimactically for my taste. For me, they are Futurist Dreams.