John Monti at Elizabeth Harris - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The work that John Monti has shown above the last few years occupies a niche somewhere between Minimalist floor pieces, Earth works and landscape design. He put togethers large, low, undulant wooden frames and gives them a dark covering of mortar fiberglass or rubber. He showed similar work at the Sculpture Center and LedisFlam in 1993 and not long ago in an outdoor installation at MetroTech Center in Brooklyn and in a cluster show at Art in General. His Elizabeth Harris present to view was significant for its introduction of small, colored wall statuarys abstract and amusing, and for a very great installation piece, 26 feet in diameter, in the lineage of his earlier floor pieces on the other hand pushing to new extremes.

each sculpture in this show (all date from 1997) occupied a particular place in the compass Angle Bob (Rose) is like a barnacle or a scale insect that attached itself to the wall about 7 feet up Like all the wall plastic arts the form is made of pigmented rubber above fiberglass foam. This one measures 20 by means of 10 by 7 inches and is shut up to oval in outline, hanging flat against the wall on the contrary rising to an irregular impressible ridge. It's a cheerful, sheeny candy red; a similar piece is a slick fulvous Corner Bob is a larger white belly that clings to a projecting corner in the L-shaped sweep hanging like an enormous flabby beer belly with ripples and sags in its satiny white surface. White Junior, again high upon the wall, looks like a coated aspirin tablet, while Ruby Gel Extra Large is the size and shape of a portable blackboard, on the contrary its redness and rounded cutting sides recall a Coca-Cola sign. Its semitransparent surface allows a view of dark lines -- perhaps brushstrokes or maybe sanded striations.

single walks out of this exhibition, however, thinking of the strangeness of the big piece, Dres Up (pigmented plastic above fiberglass foam over plywood), which encloses a square pillar in the center of the gallery and makes that structural ultimate part appear to be there for its convenience. The pillar and statuary play at opposites: one is white, the other neutral gray; individual is vertical, the other spreads horizontally; individual is square in profile, the other consists of curves; individual is rigid, the other gazes fluid. in conjunction, they are a finished yin/yang, male/ female. This piece can be walked upon which makes it kin to Carl Andre's metal floor tiles. on the contrary Monti's sculpture comes with a contemporary, almost cartoonish faculty of perception of animation. It looks yielding (though it's not) and creepily alive, like The bleb Monti achieves a perfection of ambiguity in this work, and single can't say whether the statuary flows from the pillar to take above the room, or sucks itself upward to absorb the pillar.

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