Edge of the Sublime: Enamels by Jamie Bennett at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, is a stunning retrospective for one of this country’s most innovative and influential enamelists. In what the Museum is calling its most important show to date, Edge of the Sublime includes over one hundred ornaments along with paintings, enameled wall reliefs, and drawings, sketches, and notebooks all displayed to allow the viewer a glimpse into the artist’s process.

Bennett is known for his imaginative, painterly approach to his fired enamel and metalwork, which appears in more than twenty museums internationally, including London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Arts & Design in New York, and the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. The retrospective highlights examples from all of Bennett’s major series of works from the 1970s to today. Over the years, Bennett has drawn on numerous sources for inspiration—garment patterns, the natural world, the human form, his travels, specifically through Italy, Morocco and Turkey, and Islamic art and culture, among others. These influences are all represented in this truly remarkable exhibition.

Upon entering the gallery, one is immediately struck by the saturated color palette that is Bennett’s hallmark. The walls and cases burst with color— the paintings and wallpieces informing the jewelry and vice versa. Interestingly, some of Bennett’s early pieces on display are nearly monochromatic at first glance—more intense color is used judiciously as enhancement. Shirt Pattern 3 (a neckpiece) and Raglan (a pendant) from the White series, which he created in the late 1970s, for example, are crisp, linear representations of shirt patterns rendered mainly in muted gray, black, white, and beige, with only gentle hints of pink, yellow and brown. In the Black Fragment series, in brooches such as Pattern and Black Basilica 15, these patterns have metamorphized and have a much more organic look; they could be mountains shrouded in mist, crevasses in rock or ice, or bones.

In 1980, Bennett pays homage to the classic red barn in his Red Site series. His barns are blistering red and completely deconstructed and abstracted in his brooches Red Site 1, 2, 3. Further pieces from the 1980s, such as the brooches Coloratura 3, Totem and Deerrun 14, reveal an astonishing array of colors, both vibrant and subtle, and also Bennett’s unique technical ability to showcase these enamel “jewels” to greatest effect. November Fragment, a brooch created in 1985, consists of three enamel fragments, each set gem-like in silver bezels. The overall palette is subtle but intoxicating—shades of white and blue, butterscotch, moss, pink-purple, with flashes of red. In other pieces from this era, Bennett sets the enamels and then juxtaposes them with metal elements, creating a completely balanced, visually exciting composition. The brooch Deerrun 2 features two framed enamel fragments in shades of green, orange, teal, and hints of violet and red festooned with a sail or fin of textured gold.

It was during the late 1980s that Bennett essentially revolutionized the way the art world conceived of enamel. In his Priori series he freed the enamel from the bezel, the stylized convention that signified jewelry in an institutional sense, and allowed the enamel a life of its own as ornament. Bennett did this by electroforming the enamel, creating a completely original form. These three-dimensional sculptural shapes are inspired by nature. Most are reminiscent of twigs or branches and are often accented with metal elements. Priori 17 (a brooch) is a slender enameled stick in a patchwork of subtle colors, topped with a delicate gold twig and leaf. The overall effect is graceful and extremely powerful; this is clearly adornment at its most basic and evocative.

Starting in the 1990s, Bennett’s work became increasingly influenced by non-Western art and culture, specifically the Islamic world. Bennett found inspiration in the color and design of devotional objects, tiles, textiles, among other things, and series such as Jurjani, Composed Garden and Chadour show much more decorative and intricate compositions.

In Composed Garden 6 (a brooch), gorgeous floral patterned bezel-set enamels encircle a simple, redolent gold element; Composed Garden 3 (a brooch), features oblong enamels patterned in a way that is reminiscent of tiles, set around one central floral enamel.

The pieces in Bennett’s most recent series—Florilegium, Mosaic Scenarios, Polonaise, and Urban Traces—have an even more painterly sensibility; the designs are extremely intricate and often look “brushed,” and the color palettes are immense. Urban Traces 1 and Urban Traces 4, both neckpieces, are long strands of round bezel-set enamels each depicting its own singular, luxurious scene and connected by beautiful spacers. Florilegium 1 is a brooch with a lush floral painting peeking out of its substantial, stylized frame. Mosaic Scenarios 10 (a brooch), with its delicate brushwork is, essentially, a framed mosaic in black and white and gray, enhanced by gentle pastels and deep red—similar to its forbearers in the Black Fragment series.

Edge of the Sublime: Enamels by Jamie Bennett continues at the Fuller Craft Museum until May 4, 2008. After that it will travel nationally to the National Ornament Museum in Memphis, Tennessee; the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz, New York; the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock; the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin; and the Bellevue Arts Museum in Washington. The Fuller Craft Museum is located at 455 Oak Street, Brockton, Massachusetts 02301; www.fullercraft.org.