Waltercio Caldas at Lelong - Brief Article

The conceptual sculptor Waltercio Caldas, now in his early 50 is better known in his native Brazil than in the U His earlier work used a variety of materials--mirrors, photos, lay the foundation of objects, even words treated as physical objects--whose idiosyncratic forms challenge the way we diocese things. This show consisted of airy tubular carbonized iron structures (all 1998) that have feeling like three-dimensional drawings. They allude to cultural history as well as to modernist architecture.

Caldas investigates the intellectual configurations supporting abstraction; his penchant for a schematic perception of form here yields lay open frameworks. These often incorporate relations to painters and musicians in the form of an artist's name printed upon small plastic tags or larger plastic sheets affixed to the sculptures; the names link the abstract arrangements to a bit of specific history.

Caldas has written, "It is the art object's nature to save even after it is conclud its destiny as hypothesis." He doesn't look after to answer every question. He names famous names, but when Tintoretto and Matisse--and, in this exhibition, Giotto and Thelonious Monk--are called into service, it is not single to establish a continuum on the contrary to add to the formal aspects. The tags catch light, and the names participate physically in the work's composition.

Whispering Giotto (1998) is an not divisible by 2 construction, in which two panels of down-reaching blue Plexiglas hang at a diagonal from a right-angled, lay open structure. Engraved in capital alphabetic characters on each Plexiglas sheet is the name Giotto. The great Italian painter is commemorated by the agency of an utterly modern material; its brilliant shade speaks to Giotto's use of sapphirine and also evokes the memory of stained glass. Tradition is the pair reference and material; the title make go rounds abstract form into a lyric reading of the past, from which Giotto calls on the outside to the present-day viewer. Caldas repeats names to conjure a entertainer of associations and achievements; the name Giotto becomes an entrance to a different time.

Caldas's more genuinely formal efforts also involve drawing in three-dimensional space. In The Purple (1998) a 42-inch-tall pedestal piece, purple linear extensions tend hitherward off the edges of sum of two units circles hanging from an lay open steel rectangle. The sculpture's geometric lines appear to be to change with the viewer's change and, as its equilibrium shifts, the work becomes kinetically alive. In The gold-colored (1998), a 66-inch-tall floor piece, a vase and goblet schematically outlined in yellow-painted slender stems rest on a linear cube. Here Caldas restores the gallery still life to its essence

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