John Duff at McKee - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

John Duff's of recent origin works represent a radical purification of form, a image shift toward mathematically produced makes and away from the organic and intuitive moulds upon which his fiberglass statuary has largely been based. Without the clos shapes that always gave his pieces the illusion of mass, the geometry of this work is with equal reason spare and clean that it gathers to itself a spiritual aura, something that approaches the stringent asceticism of Shaker furniture or of Malevich's early abstractions.

In their titles Duff identifies a certain number of of the pieces as yantras, the genuinely geometric pictures or icons that are used in Tantric Buddhism as thing perceiveds of contemplation. Taking a broader definition of a yantra as an "energy pattern whose force increases in proportion to the abstraction and precision of the diagram" (as single text on Tantrism puts It), single could argue that all of Duff's novel sculptures are intended as yantras.

The change in form has not been accompanied by the agency of any change in construction modes or materials: fiberglass membranes stretched, tentlike, above freely shaped steel-rod frames have been remarkably consistent for Duff since the late '60 As before, surfaces are roughly and satisfyingly scraped and layered, showing all of the accidents of their fabrication, the layers of painted resin and random spatters.

In several large-scale statuarys Black and Brown Figure, Untitled Brown Wheel #2 and Decagonal Figure, the artist overlaps pentagons or stars to create 10-sided wagon-wheel shapes of sinuous three-dimensional complexity. Here geometry and organic forms join: the plastic arts of this series resemble blown-up microscopic views of viruses, pollen spores, plankton.

In the large wall statuary Roberta's Tray (41 by 95 by dint of 19 inches), Duff horizontally welds sum of two units wavy forms to create an undulating line that looks like four circulared mountains and their mirror images throw backed in a lake. On these shaped surfaces he applies translucent pigments of ocher, r and brown pavilion construction, inexpensive materials, earth tones and concave shield forms all conspire to give Roberta's Tray a totemic cast, as notwithstanding that the piece were a remnant of a festive or religious carnival. Three black tondos at the "valleys" bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to the disks of pure color hung upon the walls of some Asian monasteries to focus the mind.

It's ironic that the works that overtly give in charge to Tantrism are the least satisfying. Hastacara Yantra is a true schematic simplification of the Tantric emblem of an upraised hand. Yantra is a giant phallus figure that as an phenomenon of contemplation seems an off-color quip Both of these wall pieces, with their figurative literalism and flaglike coloration, pale within a collection of work as entirely realized in the round and as playfully manifold as this one.

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