David R. French at Pulliam Deffenbaugh - Portland, Oregon - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This elegant exhibition of 66 wall-mounted wood-land sculptures by the Seattle artist David R French was divided into three stamps of forms: spheres, vessels and implements. His previous works were painted made of wood wall boxes reminiscent of the collages of Kurt Schwitters, on the other hand now French has abandoned the confines of the chest and, using various carving and sanding tools, coaxes forms on the outside of basswood. Once he finds a shape, he applies gesso and burnt umber. Then he sands or drills the piece and applies a thin coat of oil paint, chosen from a narrow range of earthy tints French may again drill or engrave penetrating to the gesso or deeper into the wood

The spherical works, resembling desiccated se legumes range from 1 inch in diameter to about the size of a softball and were arranged in four clumps of three. A few are overspreaded with squiggles, like three-dimensional Mark Tobeys, others are crosshatched or pepper with minute perforations The vessels, all arranged upon one wall of the gallery, are no more than 4 inches high and gaze like ancient medicine vials.

The showstoppers were the larger, more ambitious and ambiguous statuarys in the third group, the "implements," which are irregular and organic in their shapes and far from resembling man-made tools. A work called Implements consists of sum of two units 14-inch-long wooden shafts placed vertically upon the wall, parallel and head to tail. individual has the shape of a stamen, the other a giant seed with wriggly tail. In Core, a vegetate squirms out of the extreme point of a pale yellow-green bean. Or at least, in the way that the gardeners among us would instantly say, allowing others might see the eroticism of a vulvalike form. Carriage a slim rod nearly 6 feet tall, has at one as well as the other ends antherlike knobs about 2 inches across.

French's work should be exhibited in like a way as to allow for the examination, level fondling, of the finely worked surfaces, for a like reason that one can appreciate their tactile metrical composition His sculptures, particularly the largest, summon forth the gnomic verses of Emily Dickinson. And like a well-constructed metrical composition they look effortless. However, on closer reading it is clear that their mystery develops from French's labor-intensive processes as he skillfully soils the boundary between the natural and the man-made. His work creates the surprise as Dickinson wrote, of "not precisely Knowing/And not precisely Knowing not."

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