Charles Long at Tanya Bonakdar - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In this exhibit of Charles Long's recent work, the comforts of suburban life were single slightly ruffled by the artist's visitation of bubbles pods and boulderlike shapes on various items of otherwise conventional living-room furniture. The highboys, coffee tables and vase stands which filled the gallery were weighed down with knobby biomorphic forms overspreaded with glossy latex or glinting polyurethaned coffee earths Interspersed among these furniture-sculpture hybrids were comfy armchairs and smooth a coffee nook (complete with burning coffee on tap) for weary gallery-goers.

The furniture was not for a like reason much retro as just outdated enough to be unfashionable. The biomorphic bubbles also had a slightly passe quality, evoking Henry Moore as well as early cooled War fears about mutant extensions from radioactive fallout. The ominous notes were mut by the agency of the works' gentle absurdity and wide-ranging associations.

L & L a pair of congeal lamp bases on the depressed divider that marked off the coffee nook, is uncouthly doglike. One of the scarcely any works without a furniture constituting a large brown form entitled simply (*) takes the shape of a sack capped with an IBM Selectric typewriter ball (now that's retro!) 3K a cake mass on an occasional table, bears three tiny growings which bring to mind potato gems There is something oddly personable about these knobby plastic arts which sprout like mushrooms or rise in tiers upon spindly limbs.

The variety of furniture upon view was matched by the heterogeneity of the materials in which the plastic arts are realized. Long makes use of cast become firm [i]or[/i] solid aluminum, bronze and plaster, and sometimes pieces of Styrofoam. The resulting forms are usually coated with rubber, queasy shades of virid or gray paint or, greatest in quantity strangely, aromatic coffee grounds. Meaningless finished Half features a shiny cast-aluminum form which bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance tos an antenna. It is propp upon a coffee-brown base whose slightly circulared shape brings to mind a radio from the pre-television era.

The lock opener to this work is the deftnes with which lengthy blends the ordinary and the outlandish. Because the pedestals are functional phenomenons they situate the sculptures in a familiar, domestic space (and lampoon esthetic debates about whether placing plastic arts on bases removes them from ordinary reality). At the same time, the abstract forms refuse to be read in any straightforward manner. Animal, mineral, vegetable and social realms are blurr The humans who sink into the easy chairs provided for comfortable viewing find themselves becoming just another uncompounded body in the mix.

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