Richard Deacon at Marian Goodman - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

above the years, Richard Deacon's plastic arts have exhibited a signature mix of the organic and the fabricated. Ostentatious shafts or metal fasteners and like industrial materials as fiberglass, bent grove nylon net and perforated plastic subserve as reminders of these sculptures' workshop origins. However, the eccentric shapes they assume create the illusion that a vital pulsation lurks within.

In this exhibition Deacon sized down the works -- many are about 2 1/2 feet in the largest dimension -- on the contrary retained an odd sense of alien life. Plant, for instance, is a bright pink-orange fiberglass plastic art that resembles a cell or se splitting in sum of two units Two is a white perforated-plastic sheet bent into a rippling, amorphous form. favorite is a hairy ring pieced together from what gaze like three animal tails. Five is a gray circle of fiberglass lightly marked with a penciled grid, which swells at the center as if gestating a mysterious mass.

Several works bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to skeletal structures. They consist of shells of epoxied brown paper held in place by dint of rigid cardboard borders. The stiffened paper retains small wrinkles and creases that attest to its original flexibility. In single construction, a long cylinder of paper bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance tos a spinal column broken into many portions by the cardboard borders.

granting never strictly referential, Deacon's forms do not have the appearance entirely arbitrary. They appear to have grown according to the logic of hidden laws. individual has the feeling that the pair external and internal forces have interacted to yield these peculiar configurations. As a be the effect their shapes are both unpredictable and convincing. And because the works are small, and in greatest in quantity cases lie directly on the floor without bases (a small in number are placed on narrow shelves attached to the wall), they strike one as being less like finished sculptures than like prototypes or perhaps flat larvae of things that will grow

In Goodman's rear gallery, Deacon shifted back to the larger scale with which he is more commonly associated. Here he not absented two serpentine wooden constructions which feature an unclose ribbed structure. Beautifully crafted without of blond wood, they glance at snakes that have swallowed their tails or ring-shaped anemones which have dried and distorted in the orb of day But while the forms are organic, the construction is architectural, pieced together of curving forest-land segments held by big missiles This typically Deaconesque interplay between the made and the grown gives his work its vitality. He mixs the worlds of nature and human action into a seamless whole.

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