KAREN WILKIN
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included intimately scaled, pale "leaves"-sheet-like forms that she has
explored in concrete and resin over the past few years-inserted loosely
and apparently disappearing into floor-level slots in the wall. (FenLinist
critics and Freudians alike could do a lot with these.) Most effective was a
folded slab, slightly darkened in the "interior," tucked into its slot to
become an ambiguous object/place loaded with associations ranging from
anatomy to geography
to
sacred architecture. A selection of Westerlund
Roosen's urgent drawings gave clues to the evolution of these sculptures.
The main event was a parade of narrow, molded "columns" of resin–
soaked flannel, seemingly slicing through the gallery's longest wall at
irregular intervals. Their confi'ontational verticaliry evoked the figure, but
that was immediately neutralized by repetition. As you moved along the
piece, an insistent, syncopated rhythm made itself felt, while the individu–
aJiry of each "column"-differences of color, surface, inflection, and
apparently translucency-became increasingly evident. At once body-like
and architectural, fleshy and fabric-like, soft and brittle, the slender
"pleats" fused Westerlund Roosen's ongoing fascination with skin, both as
metaphor and as physiology, wi th her wholly sculptural sense of structure.
Even the way the long, vertical resin elements emerged from their slits,
dragging the edges forward, turned the wall itself into a kind of skin, a layer
that could be peeled off.
Obviously, the contrast between pristine (if sliced) whi te wall and rosy
"pleats" was important, but 1 kept thinking about the exhibition's
announcement card, which showed the piece within the walls of a barn at
the artist's upstate New York properry. The dialogue between expressive,
fleshy,
lIIade
forms and the linear geometry of the building was suggestive
and made me wonder how her future pieces would deal wi th this conver–
sation between container and contained.
And for sheer delight, this fall, it was hard to beat (once again) the
exhibition at C&M Arts, an impeccably chosen survey of Matisse's sculp–
ture that, as previous shows at the gallery have led us to expect, ranged
from the archerypal to the surprising.
It
was alone worth a visit to see the
three incarnations of the spiraling standing figure,
Made/eille
(1901
and
1903):
two closely related sculptures, familiar from their appearance in
Matisse's paintings, differentiated mainly by the divergent nature of bronze
and plaster, and a third, more articulated, vigorously inflected version that
evoked the tradi tion of Mannerist bronzes more than of early twentieth–
century modernism. I have a special weakness for the robust, arching
Nil
ass is, bras derriere /e dos
(1909), but it was impossible
to
ignore any of the
wonderful sculptures in this splendid little show.
