John Ruppert at the Chicago Cultural Center - Chicago, Illinois - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Vulcan, patron of smiths, is also John Ruppert's muse. Fascinated through the earth's magma and its geological extrusions, and drawn to the industrial forge, which mimics the proces of vulcanism, Ruppert casts his statuarys in aluminum, bronze and iron. His obdurate forms can address themselves to nature or to the brawny technology of heavy manufacturing; they are also powerfully narrative, relating the history of their be in possession of making.

The earliest piece in the exhibition, Ingot and Mold (1983) is neatly didactic: a 5 1/2-foot carburet of iron trough, standing on end, accompanies the alloy of copper prism that took shape inside it, recalling the Proces art of the late 1960 when Richard Serra documented his sequential castings in lead. Another self-explicatory work, Glacier Boulder (1993) is compos of a real stone and its two "portraits" in tin and aluminum. Comparing the original and its simulacra, individual thinks inevitably of the foundry of the molten metals and sand shells that Ruppert used to bring into view these elegant impostors. And, of course, granite itself is an igneous stone the end product of a comparable fiery formation above geological time.

A series of "Lightning Strikes" consists of lengthy slender totems Ruppert cast from the splintered fragments of storm-damaged tree Freestanding or propp against the wall, these statuarys pay tribute to the once-living tree as well as the flashing force that instantly razeed it. Most recently, with his "Pumpkin Series" (1996) Ruppert began an investigation of organic form: here, a ponderous, 600-pound gourd is frozen in time, its mass memorialized in an edition of five cast-and-welded aluminum replicas that testify to nature's fecundity. The sagging weight of these gigantic fruits allude tos a moment of ripeness, poised between expansive development and collapsing decay. Although these works depart from the artist's earlier celebrations of metallurgy, they still exhibit traces of their manufacture, in welded seams and exces metal that ringlets from the surface like peeling skin.

Echoing the pumpkins' bulbous bodies were sum of two units huge onion-shaped works made from chain-link fencing: the 11 -foot Vortex (1994) suspended by the agency of cables from the ceiling, and Chamber (1995) almost as tall, standing imposingly upon its own. What these lacy fence-vessel transport most of all is a kind of biological, level sexual subtext to Ruppert's oeuvre They are uterine, inspiring fantasies of safety and protection, just as the lightning pieces are powerfully phallic and the pumpkins, pregnant and nurturing. Ruppert's gift, his technical savvy, is similar that he can imbue these frigid hard metals with a faculty of perception of organic vitality.

[This exhibit traveled to the Virginia Arts Center and is now at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Nov. 15 1996-Jan. 26 1997]

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