Salon 94: Artists

<small>a “natural” inverse readymade
with integral piédouche and socle
created by man, by the hand of God</small>

The artist, taking the life-cast head of his New York gallerist as a jumping-off point, in a concerted effort to reinvigorate the sub-genre of romantic portrait sculpture, has here conjoined his signature fever-pitch execution intensity and a newfound conceptual tenderness. Realized at 90% scale in the rare, uniquely un-figured black marble known as ‘Belge Noir’, exhibiting a layered surface suffused with a ‘sfumato’ overlay of foliate relief and coincident miniscule diagonal / radial flutes, the stony surrogate captures, in soft Galatean contravention of its obdurate materiality, a moment of poignant reverie. The artist-designed integral / modular base, it’s tapering parabolic sweep flowing into the sculpture’s mirror-polished flute stem (which, in turn, terminates in a silhouetted arboreal fringe), conceived in parallel with the sculpture, precisely-fabricated in stainless steel, limestone, acrylic-spray-lacquered aluminum and wood (and a variety of subsidiary materials) by a studio-coordinated consortium of disparate fabricators, is reminiscent, alternately, of traditional ‘socles’ and mid-20th-century Modernist furniture pedestals. The resultant deceptively-diminutive ensemble, created with deep reverence for and specific focus on the history of sculpture, makes an expansive case for the critical reconsideration of prevailing contemporary practice, while simultaneously probing both the subject’s psychology and her complex relationship to the artist.

The artist, taking the life-cast head of his New York gallerist as a jumping-off point, in a concerted effort to reinvigorate the sub-genre of romantic portrait sculpture, has here conjoined his signature fever-pitch execution intensity and a newfound conceptual tenderness. Realized at 90% scale in the rare, uniquely un-figured black marble known as ‘Belge Noir’, exhibiting a layered surface suffused with a ‘sfumato’ overlay of foliate relief and coincident miniscule diagonal / radial flutes, the stony surrogate captures, in soft Galatean contravention of its obdurate materiality, a moment of poignant reverie. The artist-designed integral / modular base, it’s tapering parabolic sweep flowing into the sculpture’s mirror-polished flute stem (which, in turn, terminates in a silhouetted arboreal fringe), conceived in parallel with the sculpture, precisely-fabricated in stainless steel, limestone, acrylic-spray-lacquered aluminum and wood (and a variety of subsidiary materials) by a studio-coordinated consortium of disparate fabricators, is reminiscent, alternately, of traditional ‘socles’ and mid-20th-century Modernist furniture pedestals. The resultant deceptively-diminutive ensemble, created with deep reverence for and specific focus on the history of sculpture, makes an expansive case for the critical reconsideration of prevailing contemporary practice, while simultaneously probing both the subject’s psychology and her complex relationship to the artist.

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