Doug Jeck at Dorothy Weiss - San Francisco, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Doug Jeck's fragmented statuarys of the male figure remind me of Rodin's statement, "When a profitable sculptor models a torso, he not single represents the muscles, but the life which animates." In fact, Rodin's L'Homme qui marche (1877 1905) which necessitys neither head nor arms for its wide, expansive stride, has been an important inspiration for Jeck as were rigid walking male figures from ancient Egypt Giacometti's "Walking Men" and the poignant clay figures of Stephen De Staebler.

In this exhibit the standing, kneeling or seated figures, all naked males, were placed around the gallery in the way that that they directed their contemplative gazes toward each other. relations to classical sculpture were oft-repeated The heavy muscular torso, control (1997), for instance, recalled the Belvedere Torso. Like the Hellenistic work it alludes to, control lacks head, hands and feet on the contrary instead of having been not to be found over time, these appendages have been hacked not on by the artist as he edited the work down to its not absent configuration. Subject is also considerably smaller than its Classical moulds and instead of marble, which helped transmit the qualities of virtue in the ancient work, Jeck's torso is made of clay, a modest readily available maternal that is appropriate to a time in which the heroic figure has no place.

In a more explicitly contemporary simple body a sculpture titled Prop (1996) uses actual human hair upon the head of a limbless, introspective figure. on the other hand although Jeck's figures are distanced from their Classical antecedents, they are a far exclaim from the quick-frozen human replicas of George Segal or Duane Hanson's hyper-realist plastic arts of everyday folk.

The pedestals are an integral simple body In the case of individual seated figure, rebar spikes permanently affix its material part to a wooden base, potentially allowing the work to be carried aloft like an effigy in a procession. Many of the figures are assembled of exchanged material part parts. In one case, an almost life-size head is superimposed upon the body of a abundant smaller figure. In Rule (Ballerin), a memorable 1997 work, the powerful masculine material part has been decapitated and its head, move rounded backwards and sideways, lashed to the neck with a draw as by a rope which the artist has previously used to whip the earthenware figure.

Examples (1997) is a sorrowful, kneeling figure. Its head is made with clay of a different color and consistency from that of the material part and the legs project at right angles from the set up body. As in all of Jeck's work, the figure is archetypeed with meticulous articulation. The artist daubed r iron oxide onto the clay before firing, creating bloodlike splashes of color that glance at martyrdom. The form was, in fact, inspired by means of photographs of Austrian Jews forced through Nazis to kneel in humiliation upon the streets of Vienna. on the contrary like the other sculptures by means of Jeck, this is not an explicit narrative. Rather than telling stories, Jeck is more interested in reflecting, end his incomplete and vulnerable plastic arts on the ambiguity of human experience and historic memory.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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