John Chamberlain at PaceWildenstein - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

John Chamberlain presides above what, for an artist, numbers as a big industrial operation. A collagist at heart, and a highly productive single at that, he requires sufficiency of raw material to pick and pick out from. In his case that material is automobile metal: massive heavy and in need of crushing, wadding, twisting, cutting and spraypainting. The Chamberlains to which we are accustomed take ungainly, disparate uncompounded bodys and fuse them into elegantly poised wholes. That balancing act has remained in the classic modernist formal tradition: an asymmetrical push and shake an intuitively won resolution of weight, vector, color, mass and line. This spring's exhibition at PaceWildenstein, titled "Chamberlain's Fauve Landscape," showed a different side of the artist's sensibility. While these of recent origin works are still constructed of his signature materials, their compositonal format has changed markedly.

The exhibit consists of two huge works (his largest to date) the pair of which were executed in 1997 in his Sarasota factory-studio. The Privet is 12 1/2 feet high, 60 feet lengthy and a little under 2 feet in depth; while The Hedge, a file of 16 square units, placed parallel to each other and move rounded at an angle of about 30 stages to the gallery wall, measures 4 through 4 by 50 feet. The Privet is compos of drawn out upright rows of crimped, visually interlocking metal ribbons, each a not many inches wide, mounted on a depressed rectangular base of larger crumpl pieces. The ribbons corkscrew upward, then flare without a bit at the top. Not easy in mind with mere color variation, Chamberlain loads each ribbon and base simple body with a melange of juicily garish tones, patterns and spray treatments. The resulting chromatic cacophony planes itself out, and our organ of visions travel over the length of the piece, picking on the outside color correspondences and runs, playing vertical regular [i]or[/i] melodious movements against horizontal ones and reading the crafty interplay of line and turn transparency and opacity. This is true much the way one direct the eyes at paintings. especially big, abstract field paintings.

The title of the present to view is to the point -- the Fauves were painters, and The Privet is a real painterly work. It also gazes remarkably like a piece of the landscape, a privet hedge, in fact -- smooth to the extent of casting a pattern of moderately cold dappled shade on the floor and wall behind it. This sort of direct regard is not what one associates with Chamberlain; the sculptures' automotive provenance normally suffices.

The biggest departure in the couple of these sculptures, though, is the composition. It is equally weighted, overall, and to all intents and intentions symmetrical. The Hedge makes this point emphatically. Each of the units is a chunky 4-foot square, 1 paw thick, with a 2-foot opening in the center The squares are made of crushed painted carbonized iron or similarly crumpled stainless carburet of iron and chrome, no paint. They are place down on the floor in a nononsense Minimalist way, colored square followed by dint of plain square (except for a single mischievous unpainted/unpainted episode in the middle). The without contents centers are aligned and the units are placed far enough apart with equal reason that every element reads clearly -- just sort of logical, systematic arrangement Donald Judd might have suggested

This display marks a particularly interesting move round in the work of a prolific and inventive artist. Lively and upbeat, it looks willing to mount, if not a challenge, then at least a spirited replication to the large-scale work of Frank Stella, the Minimalists and smooth Jackson Pollock. Chamberlain has risked forcing his vision upon a format that is unsuitable to it. That he has shakeed it off with such visual wit and elan is a testament to his skill, experience and ambition.

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