Sculptors drawn to the power of suggestion
Drawing requires the artist's most delicate touch, and sculpture the most forceful. We don't often think of the two forms in one work, but maybe we should, because three exhibitions up now - Michael Beatty at Barbara Krakow Gallery, Gregory Gómez at OH+T Gallery, and Cal Lane at Judi Rotenberg Gallery - feature works by sculptors, many of whose sculptures read like drawings.
Beatty, in an artist's statement, refers to his pieces as maps and declares that they give "physical reality to emotional topography." He has two fun, inviting bodies of work here, both wall sculptures. The one that invokes drawing pairs lines of looping beech wood with lines of steel; the two materials, and the forms they take, read like a clash, or a collaboration, between right brain and left, the fluidly emotive and the rational.
"Full Circle" sports a long strand of wood circling like the loops of a shoelace within a steel ring. It's a full circle, all right, but so pinched it folds over on itself. Compare that to the unbound "Here and There," with wild lines orbiting the center circle like electrons buzzing about the nucleus of an atom, and steel joints at the intersections that seem to keep everything from flying apart, or "Even Keel," in which a goofy spiral of wood twines around a sensible passage of stair-stepping steel.
Each of these weighs volume against line, and in this body of work line wins. The shadows they cast on the wall and the way they squiggle and strut in space bring drawing into three dimensions.
In Beatty's second grouping, volume carries the day. These untitled abstract pieces, carved out of layers of plywood, sprout from the wall, each a flat-face blossom with voluptuously beveled sides. The emotional topography is here, too: The faces, washed in pale milk paint and running with the vertical edges of the sandwiched wood, bring to mind the farmer couple in Grant Wood's "American Gothic" - prim, a little dour. But those curvaceous edges suggest depths of sensuality refusing containment.
Bronze age
In several public projects that Gómez has undertaken around the country, making intricate hieroglyphs that skitter over massive surfaces, the work reads almost like elegant graffiti. In a gallery setting, his bronze wall sculptures have more heft; their rugged materiality is crucial to their allure.
He based most of his pieces at OH+T on early world maps or diagrams of airports and old fortifications. In bronze, "Houston International" reads like a pictogram. The bronze imbues it with the sense that it's centuries old. Its shape also recalls an electronic contraption, with nodes and circuits and panels, yet with a textured, ropy surface that makes it seem like a dug-up relic.
As Beatty does, Gómez mounts his work away from the wall, so the play of light around it casts shadows that give the art another, haunted life. Indeed, without light and shadow, these sculptures might simply be objects, heavy and curious and odd.
The artist uses this ineffable medium to particular effect in his one non-diagrammatic piece, "The Frames," a delightful leap into art theory. Look at a painting and you see a world within the frame. Gómez gives us three empty frames. He exaggerates their emptiness by adding, in bronze, the nail and wire that keep each on the wall. With the shadows they cast, that emptiness is palpable, yet there's still the sense that you could jump through the frame into another world. I'd take the meta-paintings in "The Frames" over any number of real paintings.
Heavy metal
What Cale Lane has going for her, in her show at Judi Rotenberg, are medium and technique. She draws on metal, then swiftly carves out the intricate designs with a plasma cutter. Lane has done this with shovels and wheelbarrows, giving manly objects a feminine spin with lace-like cutouts. The doily-like wheelbarrow is a brilliant piece.
More recently, she's been working with oil cans and oil barrels, and Lane carves allegorical narratives alongside the delicate patterns. It's a natural progression, given her material: Oil is fraught with political, economic, and social meaning. Setting figures amid such ornate designs recalls medieval tapestries.
While I liked the form, I found the content overreaching; it's hard to insert political content into art without scolding the viewer. "Hemispheres Oil Map" puts a map of the world onto the drum, cut open and unfurled, with lid and bottom unfolding above and below, to give the piece a cruciform twist and bring in religious implications - is the earth, at this point, akin to Christ on the cross?
The works carved in the oil cans, also hanging on the wall, are sometimes saucy, but often hard to read or interpret. One last oil drum, the floor piece "Untitled Prayer Rug," uses the drum's lid and base as a big spool, from which unfurls the open drum, covered with a bevy of nudes engaged in all sorts of carnal fun. Visually it's gorgeous, with the delicacy of carving on such brawny material. But the content is heavy-handed, too easy. Simply jamming sexuality and religion together doesn't get to the heat of either.
