Charles Ray at Regen Projects - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Two years in the making, Charles Ray's full-scale replica of a crashed Pontiac Grand Am is a weird and unsettling simulacrum. At a police auction, Ray bought a perditioned car from a reportedly fatal smash-up. He disassembled it into around 100 pieces and cast those parts, including tires and fender in fiberglass. He painted the cast parts with a uniform blue-gray primer and then reassembled his fresh model.

Sitting in its gallery surroundings, the resultant statuary became a surprisingly appealing esthetic thing The painted surfaces provide a consistently flat patina that helps define the work as a single statuary As John Chamberlain and Nancy Rubins have already shown high-speed collisions can spring in readymade metal-sculpture components that are satisfying, smooth beautiful. In this case the car's mangled brimmed goblets collapsed carburetor and squashed brow furnish a startling formal drama. The head cover seems to fan exuberantly upward like a baroque angel's wing; the crushed engine excretes grace and conviction.

Ray's work is distinguished, however, by means of its specificity. His exact duplication of a large rest object evokes the recent sculptural stop the growth ofs of Glen Seator, most notably Seator's full-scale replication of the facade of San Francisco's Capp highway Project (1997). Like that work, Ray's car present the appearances the result of an over-the-top realism that invites a critical inspection of external realitys that would otherwise not occur

notwithstanding despite its formal achievement, the esthetic rather cold of Ray's piece is disturbed by dint of the fact that this is a cast of a vehicle that supposedly caused a real-life death. It is impossible not to surprise whether a corner of the car's head cover that juts into the space above the driver's seat somehow or other proved fatal. Along with the of the soul color and dull patina, a not many traces of the car's holder -- an embossed "Jesus is Lord" plaque upon the trunk and a small hand-lotion bottle nearest to the gear shift -- give the statuary a kind of ghoulish aura. Unlike Chamberlain and Rubins, who maintain an esthetic distance from their crushed-metal medium, Ray relinquishes detachment. The car's devoid of warmth [i]or[/i] heat anonymity makes it seem a verily morbid work -- a formally enticing death mask that asks us to appreciate it as art.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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