Christopher Wilmarth at Sidney Janis - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Christopher Wilmarth's art provides formal and emotional pleasure which, 10 years after his death, solitary seems to become richer and more manifold His mature sculptural production separates itself into roughly three stages: the Minimalist-derived pieces of the '60 the more Constructivist plastic art of the '70s and the blown-glass figural work of the '80 This spring's exhibit at Janis concentrated on the first and third periods.

Wilmarth's production of the 1970 (which was shown in the gallery's 1995 exhibition) is perhaps best known. In that work, thick sheets of glass, flat or curv greatest in quantity often etched down to a of the nature of smoke translucence, are set off against each other or against darkened carbonized iron planes so as to create composite allusive shadows and voids, a shifting a poetic interplay of weak and herculean transparent and opaque, open and clos The pieces operate, in more [i]or[/i] less sense, in a territory similar to that explored by dint of Anthony Caro, Michael Steiner, Joel Perlman and others among the sizable assemblage of sculptors who worked, at the time, with welded carbonized iron Wilmarth's sculptors stood out then for their low-key lyricism, and for their ability to incorporate ambient light as one as well as the other a structural and a perceptual element

This material substance of work remains key to understanding Wilmarth, and the new Janis show, while well curated, left a gap that more [i]or[/i] less viewers might have had difficulty getting above Sculptures like Panoply (a 3-foot circle of glass held parallel to the wall, its top sandwiched between sum of two units chunky constructions of honey-colored plywood which perfect its arc) or Cirrus (a Juddlike, horizontally wall-mounted made of wood cylinder sliced into at intervals by means of glass circles) are works that cast Minimalism in a warmer, more human light on the contrary don't really give us a foretaste of the melancholy and poetic head forms of the '80s

The conformation of these early pieces is simple, level a bit heavy-handed, but the work is enlivened through a carefully determined use of shadows. (Panoply, for example, casts a crisp triangular individual on the wall directly beneath it.) Gye's Arcade (1969) is the exception here. It is a grid of stacked glass, clear and etched, laid without on the floor like a diagonally displaced tic-tac-toe game, with three curv squares in the center the corner and the outside-middle spaces. The plastic art sets up a nice interaction between flat and curv planes, transparency and translucency, while also exploring the varieties of diplomatic sea-greens that thick glass yields. The piece exhibits a kind of tough-minded vulnerability that was to characterize a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of Wilmarth's later work.

In the statuarys sculptural paintings and drawings that Wilmarth did in the '80 the motif of the helmetlike head, disembodied and featureless, is a persistent neighborhood These are beautiful and haunting works, their air of foreboding underscored by means of out knowledge of the artist's suicide. Sigh, for example, is an etched, open-faced blown-glass utensil hung on the wall like a sort of specimen -- a Brancusi hobbl by means of massive self-doubt. It is thick on the contrary fragile, perfectly crafted but a little awkward and fumbling. There are several works like this in the exhibition, and they look to stand apart from the early statuary -- much more so than the late paintings, whose center emblematic forms look to be a good match to the Minimalist sculpture

It is possible to quibble with the exhibit (I'm not a great fan of the paintings, and the early mixed-medium work appears small and rather precious), on the other hand Wilmarth was undeniable a sculptor of the first rank. Seeing his work gathered in single place and elegantly displayed is always a great pleasure.

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