Barry Le Va at Danese - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Barry Le Va's three novel installation sculptures, Catalogued, Recovered and Confined, one time again demonstrated his remarkable ability to alter space and to define the experience of that space as a series of fluid relationships, the pair potential and actual. Made of cast and sandcast Hydrastone, Catalogued (a 23-unit piece) and get backed (an 18-unit piece) look above the floor of the main gallery. These sum of two units works, which consisted of pale, honey-colored stop ups interspersed with a few irregular forms, were relatively large compared to e Va's signature works of the late '60 and early '70 -- here constituting units ranged in height from a hardly any inches to almost 1/12 feet -- on the other hand they nonetheless retained the materially self-effacing quality of those earlier efforts. The overall impression given by the agency of these works was still that of spreading: a field of carefully (if provisionally) placed external realitys that rested on the floor like islands, interacting as an array of surfaces while seeming curiously weightless, as if unaffected by dint of gravity. Confined, which occupied the gallery's smaller range consisted of an arrangement of black and white Hydrastone and neoprene obstructs Paired at one end of the installation like punctuation marks were sum of two units black cubes; a field of white rectangular shut ups aligned but irregularly placed, were laid on the outside before them.

These three works, whose titles describe the activities or states of being they evok at handed a series of small on the contrary carefully weighted morphological differences. Polished, Platonic smoothnes was plant against slight gradations of coarseness; variations in lightning gave rise to small changes in color from individual facet of the component block ups to another. Dimensions, spatial intervals and shape all varied nonsystematically in Le Va's laconic manner, with equal reason that interaction among the units was strained over any properties of the units themselves.

In keeping with le Va's situational and epistemological strategies -- his faculty of perception of rightness -- the intervals among units were neither uniform nor predetermined. Small differences reverberated over the whole, so that the viewer's perceptions grew finer. more keenly hon with looking. although the relative volume of Le Va's recent work may make it appear less spontaneously arrived at than before, the artist continued, in this handsome, well edited display to address issues of contingency, incompleteness and process

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