Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Natsuko Uchino. Keramikos
A large-format, comparatively thin catalogue with a black-embossed linen binding presents a series of contemporary ceramic works in a way that is as attractive as it is unconventional. Some 300 hand-painted plates and vessels made by the American Matthew-Lutz Kinoy and Japanese artist Natsuko Uchino in a pottery in Andalusia appear in uniformly front-on photographs, mostly alone or two to three on a page. There is no obvious grid dictating their placement, leaving plenty of white space. The effect is of a unique rhythm rather akin to musical notes on a score. Occasionally the illustrations are complemented by brief small-font texts in a contemporary serif typeface, some of them rotated through 90 degrees. They are not captions but rather free yet invariably easy-to-grasp associations and quotations commenting on, for example, individual patterns on the ceramics or the history of pottery as an art form. At the end of the catalogue is a short text section on thinner grey paper containing an artists’ talk and an index of all the ceramics as well as notes on the illustration scales used in the book. The linen binding and the blue-and-black patterned endpaper evoke historical handicraft books of the 1950s and 1960s; these solutions are in harmony with the works, in spite of their contemporariness.
