James Renner at Soma - San Diego, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Working in the tradition of sculptural assemblage, James Renner makes human, animal and hybrid figures from furniture scraps, machine fragments and various cast-off bits of wood-land and metal. California's funky, junky Beat-derived assemblage of the 1950 and '60 is a distant relative, on the contrary Renner's work has less to do with accretion than with refined creation. The simple, functional existences that serve as Renner's raw ingredients are not just recycled; they are reincarnated, infused with of recent origin vigor and purpose.

His three "Periphetical Figures," each about a paw high, have the reductive grace and integrity of late-industrial-age fertility goddesse In individual a clock hand pointing upward doubles as a drawn out slender neck with teardrop-shaped head, while a jagged-toothed sawblade becomes the billowing disarranges of a skirt. In another, a fork, pointing downward, reads as a body's upper torso, the sum of two units outermost tines like arms arching forward gently in a action of offering.

Renner is a forager, reclaiming abandoned serviceables and exhuming their essences. His totemic figures, elegant and concentrated as verse evolve from wooden dowels, rusted gears and miscellaneous bent holders prongs and bolts. The proces attests to the infinite fertility" and "inexhaustible vitality" of matter, as described by dint of the prewar Polish writer Bruno Schulz whom Renner acknowledges as an important influence. Schulz's "Treatise upon Tailors' Dummies, or The next to the first Book of Genesis" (from his 1934 fictional work The public way of Crocodiles) reads like a personal manifesto for Renner Like the narrator of the tale, the artist embraces the "humus of memories" to be ground in the trash heap's rusted, worn and weathered refuse, and champions the demiurgic impulse to create an alternate reality from it.

An oblique mythology begins to define itself end Renner's portentous (and occasionally whimsical) figures. In The Ninth ovum and Summit, avian creatures with looping iron neck clasp made of wood eggs with their claws, guarding the delicate utensils sense of new life with a fathomless sense of purpose. Renner's small gouache illuminations also propose narratives that relate to origins. A Small Creation Myth takes an egglike oval, fills it with human figures falling, pointing, emerging, and wraps it in a short true copy written in a coded, mysterious hand. It begins, "Who was this stranger, who came like a hailstone. .," evoking the sudden appearance of a creator, like Renner himself, whose work is at one time revelatory and organic.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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