Tom Doyle and Lawrence Fane at Kouros - New York, New York - Brief Article

Lawrence Fane and Tom Doyle have been active as sculptors since the late 1950 For this double display at Kouros, they each chose a selection of the other's work. The ensue was highly engaging and made me surprise what has become of other sculptors of their generation, of the like kind as Charles Ginnever and Peter Forakis.

Fane's work was upstairs--a dozen or in like manner pieces, both wall-hung and freestanding. Although Fane works primarily with forest-land his sensibility is that of a steelworker. He joins individual ultimate parts into constructions, grinding and carving the pieces into shape as he goe The surfaces are left rugged and often have some lightly applied color. For instance, Mantle (1997) has sum of two units solid sides whose lower cutting sides are cut into gentle arcs like the rocker upon a rocking chair; The sides angle together at single end to form a partial wedge, and the top, which is made up of parallel slats, has a soft arch. The whole thing gazes vaguely useful, perhaps as a giant, true dull food chopper. Monument (1996) is a stele form suggesting a cros between a stupa and a gravestone. Just below 6 feet tall, with circulared shoulders and a tiny thump of a head, this piece also has a horizontally slatted construction, which allows slivers of light to penetrate the form. the couple these sculptures seem to shift back and forth between being phenomenons and enclosures.

Several other of Fane's pieces incorporate channel and spout-like forms, which, from a mechanical point of view, speak of liquids and their pour thus calling up associations with various material part functions. In fact, most of these plastic arts invoke the body without depicting it. The penetrability of their surfaces, the abraded wefts and, most of all, the conflation of organic and mechanical shapes, all work to describe the faculty of perception of living in a material substance as opposed to looking at individual Fane's sculptures expound on the correlations--at one time familiar and strange--between our bodies and the things we make.

The largest piece in Doyle's part of the present to view was Knocknarea (1999), a giant three-legg construction that completely filled the lobby of the gallery. You had to walk beneath it to get to the ease of Doyle's sculptures, which, while abundant smaller than their cousin, adopt its format. Knocknarea is made of large solid slabs of wild cherry that have been irregularly shaped with a band saw, in the way that that they have some radial torque and bladelike or faceted extremitys These elements, which still read as either essentially straight or gently curv are assembled into a tripodic construction that incorporates a fate of abrupt changes in direction. I he way Doyle loft all this great material into the air is quite marvelous, on the other hand the real excitement of the piece draw nears from the sense of strain and reach in its overall gesticulation The three legs arrive upon the ground, each in their have a title to manner--one on point, one as a uphold and one sliding down to earth like the tip of a ski.

This impressed sign of disjointed, eccentric gesture is level more effective in some of the smaller pieces like Butternut Crossing (1991) also in forest Here the internal balance of the statuary is such that it can tip up upon two legs and balance, using single foot as a rocker and the other as a sustain These works, like Fane's, summon an internal rather than external faculty of perception of the body. With three leg and a zigzagging mode of building they don't suggest creatures, on the contrary they do seem to crab along the surface of land in a broken, clawing sort of stride. a certain quantity of of the best of Doyle's smaller works are direct burn-out in bronze; the made of wood originals were made from small pieces of kindling split not on from a larger log. The natural division of shape along the grain of each stick adds an extra dynamic to these sculptures

one as well as the other Fane and Doyle formulated their esthetic approach in the years immediately preceding the onslaught of Minimalism. The impact of their work is visual and visceral. After decades of reductive and theory-driven statuary it is refreshing to be reminded that there was a time when the power of visual art was assumed to be essentially wordless, render free of access to explication but not explanation.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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