Robert Taplin at Trans Hudson - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Realism in statuary is different than in painting. it has little to do with questions of mechanical image production, which realist painting can't appear to escape, but is regarded with the most primitive art-making impulses, especially the push on to imbue inanimate materials with the breath of life. At least, that's the way Robert Taplin makes it present the appearance Often the lips of his make subordinates are slightly parted, as if caught in the true moment of inspiration -- of accepting the divine spark. Intense, flat anguished concentration and radiant calm are the work's emotional extremitys But there is no getting away from the materiality of Taplin's men and women They are cast in extremely finegrain concrete; a certain number of of them are solid. Left raw, with marks from the casting proces coloring their skin a reddish brown, or painted in slightly sallow approximations of living muscle and fat or displaying effectively trompe l'oeil shades of patinated and zinc they remain dense, obdurate, supremely resistant.

In scale, too, they twitch sharply away from easy accessibility. When Taplin portrays replete figures, they are slightly les than half life-size. Three of the five statuarys shown involve pairings of these diminutive figures with comparatively colossal (roughly twice life-size) disembodied heads. Making faculty of perception of the whole involves mentally breaking down and synthesizing information about work that is (literally) actual hard and already fully without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw Even the titles, borrowed from literature, present the appearance to wrap the work tight.

There remain, however, many imponderables. The material part Is a Frail Leaf The Mind Is a Fortress (1964) is a bitter and engrossing tableau combining a flaccid, dispirited man and a blindfolded woman, chin to chest, her heels drawn up and knee spread, making her at one time clenched and vulnerable. Both figures are seated, naked, upon woven lawn chairs, which rather deflatingly situates their psychic pain somewhere in Cheever political division Less complicated but just as compelling is Don't direct the eye Away (Alex), 1997, in which a red-haired woman stands proudly expos hands clasped behind her back, torso thrust forward, weight firmly upon both feet, eyes serenely clos Adjacent is her enlarged head, organ of sights staring right at the viewer and chaps slightly ajar in an expression of similar active engagement that it fairly insists upon the violation involved in considering her naked self

Without plenteous fanfare, a great deal of tremendously interesting figurative statuary has recently appeared. Stephen Balkenhol, Robert Gober, Charles Ray, Kiki Smith and plane the Chapman brothers have all, in single way or another, set up flags upon terrain once occupied only by means of a few eccentric realists -- Robert Graham, Duane Hanson. Embodiment as a puzzle -- social, pyschosexual, even spiritual -- is about the single issue that can be said to unite them. Taplin's contribution combines penetrating psychological insight with what appears to be profound skepticism about the possibilities of intimacy. on the other hand his work might also be said to stand for a kind of of great depth and heartening faith in each subject's essential wholeness and privacy.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group