Lawrence Fane at Bill Bace - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

The realitys that Lawrence Fane constructs without of found and carved grove look like things with which we are not familiar, however they seem real. Of course, as plastic arts that hang on the wall or stand upon the floor or on a pedestal, they are real, on the contrary I mean that they strike one as being to be objects of use and pleasure that belong to a realm with which plane the most traveled of us are unacquainted. I don't have any idea what an fact such as Tower (1994) could be used for, on the contrary it has a convenient height, just above 4 feet, and an airy, triangular base made of thin grove slats and an upright extremity that could be a head or a handle.

The works in his new show were all made in Fane's temporary studio in Santa Monica, near where his wife had a fellowship at the Getty Center for nine month last year. (Diana Fane is curator of African, Far Eastern and Native American Art at the Brooklyn Museum. on the contrary this is not to say that Fane's novel work is "Californian." The fact is that Fane, in California, didn't have the equipment that enables him to make the welded and cut-steel plastic arts for which he is best known. for a like reason he resorted to wood, as he has upon other occasions when he has been away from his studio. He finds a log a branch or an aged axe handle, or he purchases raw lumber. But he at no time just pastes existing things together, whether lay the foundation of or bought. He always works each simple body into a different shape, to the amplitude that he himself cannot remember which bits 6f forest-land were found and which purchased. It is also characteristic of him to change his pieces a destiny while working them. Each finished statuary comes out looking very a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of itself, not just part of a assemblage Finally, he stains the plastic arts sometimes almost imperceptibly, sometimes rather colorfully.

One of the pieces, knoll (1994), while it is small (only 18 inches high), have the appearances to me to sum up more [i]or[/i] less of Fane's concerns at this point. As in Tower, there is a triangular base made of thicket slats, but these are thicker, cruder hill seems about to set not upon on one of its three feet admitting how it could progress is unclear. The top displays sum of two units truncated, armlike branches. To call this work a figure is almost a quirk yet somehow there's a figural suggestion. Here the ambiguities and humor characteristic of all of Larry Fane's work coalesces in a determined manner that is in some way familiar to us--and yet compellingly strange.

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