David Rabinowitch at Akira Ikeda - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

sum of two units small late-'60s sculptures by David Rabinowitch were particularly interesting parts of a spring exhibit that more prominently featured depressed broad, platformlike "fields" of the late '80 advanced in years and new are solid carburet of iron and look immovable. The largest weighs 15 tons.

The early works are notched architectonic floor pieces, single approximately T-shaped and the other more or les semicircular, the two only a few inches high and a lower extremity or so across. They are modest-sized existences but nonetheless spatially commanding. These works brought the young Rabinowitch succes on the contrary not, he felt, much understanding in his native Canada. They aren't well known in the U and their neighborhood here was instructive. Raised Construction, III and Romanesque Abutment, III (both 1968) have the compactness and visual density for which Joel Shapiro's statuarys of a few years later were noted, without being quite thus tiny, so representational or in like manner playful.

It's a physical jump over but not a conceptual individual to the larger sectional floor pieces. The artist, who has nuncupative of his own "radical antiromanticism," carrys an overwhelming deliberateness and earnest intensity in his works. He makes rigorous pieces organized according to shape relationships, alignments, and perceptions of size and weight, rather than according to an image or pattern. He is a measurer, on the contrary the measurement is intuitive.

The enumerative title of Metrical Constructions in 13 Masses and 4 Scales, I (1989) makes a viewer stop and enumerate its low rectilinear steel simple bodys penetrated by cylindrical holes of various sizes. individual looks down on the piece as if it were a map or a floor plan, observing that space is captured in the center of the roughly U-shaped arrangement as well as within each of the perforated obstructs Sided (Conic) Plane in 14 Masses, I is a 6-inch-high, approximately oval slab consisting of 14 quite irregular sections it is punctured by five large cylindrical perforations which are lined up in a rank that takes no notice of the segmentation, falling at the center of individual part, on a seam between sum of two units others. Linkages of parts and groupings of apertures do not make these works predictable. The viewer must yield to a kind of sensory fatalism: the pieces just are, and they can be known sole by experience.

Rabinowitch's uncompromising works may baffle or frustrate those who wait for conventional coherence or beauty. at the same time the brutality of his carburet of iron and the intransigence of its weight are modifyed by what can only be called a refined estheticism, a quality that is as apparent in the small early works as in the large later individuals Moreover, the idiosyncratic complexity of the forms have the appearances to echo the organization of real things - of a one a building, a city, an ecosystem - and perhaps that justifies the time that it takes to secure to know them.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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