The Floating Fables of Ricky Bernstein
By Aikiko Busch
The art and the industry, the design and the craft of glasswork have often been dominated by material. The appeal of glass is innate. Its fragility, its play with light, its sudden and precise hold on liquid motion all give it a precious quality that we value almost instantaneously. Its beauty is seductive; and it is a beauty also, that a good deal of the time is purely accidental.
Ricky Bernstein is one such artist who has chosen deliberately to reject accidents of beauty. His work disclaims the celebration of materials for their own decorative splendor. Rather, he has chosen to develop a narrative and fragments of glass compose his story.
Bernstein’s work has been narrative from the start. Even the blown vessels of his most early work recorded brief storylines – a row of apple trees, a cow under a rainbow, telephone receiver ringing off the hook. Early panels were often whimsical domestic scenarios that recorded minor household mishaps and misadventures. These scenarios were uninhibited. In recent years, however, the human figure has come to occupy them with vigor and force. The humanism of these pieces has become more significant, both metaphorically and quite literally, with the arrival of his harried, though well meaning and affable, altogether sympathetic cast of characters. With them they bring to the narration a social commentary of a greater scope and content.
The collage style wall reliefs that began to emerge from Bernstein’s studio in the mid 1980’s were larger in scale and demanded more in process. Conspicuous in them is the graceful fusion of material and content. That Bernstein is technically proficient is clear in the process of his pieces. While he does not rely on surface delight alone, he exploits the glass for its visual richness. It is a subtle exploration, however, on first glance, these pieces might be mistaken for wood or cut sheets of acrylic; that they are glass is not immediately evident. Yet as one examines them, their material does become apparent. Surfaces are smooth and have a tactile quality to them; there is a richness of color and density as well that mark them as glass. The reflective surfaces of the glass give the pieces a visual lightness; they appear to float with ease although they are, in fact glued to solid aluminum armatures. Details too give them away; beveled edges make evident the transparence and opacity of color that can only be achieved through glass. The use of acrylic and oil paints distinctly adds to the texture, creating several layers of surface variety throughout.
Unexpected as well is the scale of Bernstein’s work. Oversize caricatures appear to have been lifted off the comic strips to assume massive proportions all their own. The message comes in an almost billboard scale that is in contrast to the perceived fragility of the medium. That each piece becomes three-dimensional through the layering of its many parts is again reinforced by its large scale. Gigantic cartoon graphics gesture and blurt their message with an exuberance that seems oversize as well.
And it is these messages that most distinguish Ricky Bernstein’s work. He is not content simply to manipulate material; rather he applies material to the follies of social commentary. Floating fables of domestic anxieties, Ricky’s pieces illustrate simple stories. Primitive color and form evoke qualities of simple parables. Yet their subject matter is contemporary. Vacuum cleaners consume more than common debris; telephone cords entangle their users; radios, television sets and sundry other household appliances speed through their own orbits. Items that are meant to save time and energy surprise us by their shameless consumption of it. There are small lapses of trust in the world we have built for ourselves and Bernstein spells these out in funny papers iconography. The appointments of every day life, that is to say, have small lives of their own that confuse and confound us.
None of this is said, though, without a sense of humor. There is very little that is sinister or oppressive in Ricky’s work; rather, the pieces narrate the comedy that is bound to occur when our own inventions invade our lives. If there is cynicism in the pieces, it is undercut by poignancy. These are, in essence, good-natured. Without being dogmatic, these pieces are with a conscience. They are vignettes of irreverence, happily ridiculing both the conventions and the machinations of the contemporary world.
Bernstein’s pieces record brief moments of chaos. That he has chosen glass for these fleeting narrations is significant, for glass itself is the most fluid and mercurial of mediums. In both material and content, then, Ricky Bernstein’s panels give us brief, comic pauses in a world of motion and a world in motion.
Aikiko Busch, is a freelance writer who frequently comments on architecture, design and craft.
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