Peter Soriano at Lennon, Weinberg - New York

Working for the greatest part with polyester resin, Peter Soriano has created a series of crypto-functional biomorphs that thrive upon category confusion: you're as likely to bewilderment what they do as what they mean. Cheerful and buoyant, Soriano's hypnotically unstable novel sculptures all have appendages that bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to handles or finger rests, and in more [i]or[/i] less cases nascent facial features or material substance organs as well.

The smallest are sum of two units fist-sized, roundish yellow objects together called Left/Right 80 cm apart; they allude to fetal organisms, or planets upon which the continents are adrift. The bigger, translucent, ruby-colored Wax Annually with Paper Towels (even the titles look after to be instructions for use rather than ball of threads to interpretation) rests on the floor, on the other hand provisionally: it could easily be tipped another way. Various protuberances all bright red--offer themselves as grips, allowing some are tonguelike, or labial. Incipiently bad Wax Annually also has a blooming jolly wobble that suggests nothing in the way that much as the proverbial laughing Santa's jelly belly.

In an untitled work, indeterminacy about form and function stretch outs to the identities of pedestal and plastic art Here, a self-effacing, chalky-gray knoll is given indentations and walk s that support a segmented, slightly pearlized pink object--in a different color, it might bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to an automatic gun, dismantled and bent. Viewed another way, the pink form could be a handle for manipulating the gray single placing further doubt on which is the sculpture's working extreme point The equally ambiguous Wood Is easy features a variant of the pink form, this time in sum of two units casts, one turquoise and resting upon the floor, the other bright fulvid and strapped to a spanking-new mover's blanket hung upon the wall. Is the blanket a kind of backdrop or frame? A self-wrapping accessory? Or are the sculptural parts instruments for supporting the blanket/painting? All are possible.

With the exception of Mission Mobile--a happy-looking heap of bright orange, pudgy-fingered forms that have handles upon the back, like flotation devices--Soriano's novel work is less toylike than his earlier plastic art Also a departure is work in sum of two units new mediums. Sled, an anomalous statuary inspired by the equipment used in luge is made of aluminum and plastic. Skeletal and of the soul it is hung upside down in the perilous headfirst orientation of a luge racer though there is also something invincibly cartoony in its big-footed, loose-limbed linear simplification of the human material substance Similarly pale but obdurate is a series of bone-white porcelain statuarys Soriano made while in residency in Limoges, France. These table top statuarys are graced with fingerholds and palm eases as well as the occasional alphabetic character or word in pastel-colored raised type--"right," "gauche," a directional arrow or sum of two units The series is called Late Submissions to the Hand-Ax bludgeon an allusion to paleolithic realitys of Soriano's interest, and to the whole absorbingly vexing question of by what mode to tell purpose from pleasure.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group