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PARTISAN REVIEW
Torres-Garcia's work. Like Torres-Garcia, Ivanoff, a French artist who has
been working in New York for several years, works with vernacular materi–
als to reveal the poetry and underlying order of ordinary things. He has been
concerned with water and light for some time, using these unstable compo–
nents to transform "neutral" urban places, usually spaces chosen for their
banality and their lack of personal associations.
In
Lightwater,
Ivanoff has
inserted an ephemeral architecture of falling water into a rather grim six story
concrete building. The interior becomes a vast three dimensional grid of
columns and delicate walls of water that punctuate dim spaces, framed by rec–
tangular openings often lacking their windows. "Bringing a live skin into a
dead space," Ivanoff calls it.
. When you climb to the top floor, the simplicity of the system is revealed:
a grid of white PVC pipes and a recirculating pump; gravity does the rest.
Elsewhere, it is magical. Fragile walls of water drip through perforations
Ivanoff has made through the floors, redefining the interior spaces, diffusing
and reflecting light as the drips splash and puddle. The sounds, the density of
the flow, the pattern of splashes, and the character of the space are different
on each level. It's mysterious, musical, and cool, like a Renaissance grotto, but
still unequivocally industrial. The dripping, in the barebones warehouse set–
ting, has powerful associations with nature, whittling away at the manmade
environment and, at the same time, with everyday disaster-the leaking pipe,
the damaged building. Even the smell of water in the dimly lit spaces simul–
taneously evokes both the natural world and urban decay. Through the
windows, derelict piers, the useful chaos of New York harbor, and the tang of
salt air all help to expand the metaphor.
In
the winter of 1995, Ivanoff transformed a gloomy basement in
Marseille into a ravishing "mirror room" by dividing the walls horizontally
into two subtly differentiated zones of color and texture, separated by a con–
tinuous glowing band of white neon; the floor was an expanse of still, dark
water. It's still my favorite Ivanoff, to
date----un bijou,
the artist calls it-but
Lightwater
comes a close second.
Ivanoff also had a couple of small works dealing with related concepts
tucked into a sort of leftover niche at Soho's Painting Center in a recent
group exhibition,
The French Connection
I.
The show brought together works
by young French artists associated with Triangle/France, an offshoot of
Triangle, the international artists' workshop founded by the British sculptor
Anthony Caro in 1982. Neither school nor colony, Triangle brings together
annually professional painters, sculptors, and installation artists from allover
the world for an intense two weeks of full throttle art-making, discussion,
exchange, provocation, and growth. Things
happen
in this accelerated chunk
of time, so much so that the workshop has been compared to a hothouse or
a pressure cooker.
