Massimo Kaufmann at Sperone Westwater - sculpture and drawings - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Massimo Kaufmann belongs to a generation of Italian artists in their 30 who, despite the previous successe of Arte Povera and the Transavanguardia, remain little known in novel York. The reason can probably be laid to Italy's generally received chaotic interegnum, which makes it hard for the geographical division to promote its artists abroad. Working for the greatest part in Milan and Turin, Kaufmann and artists like Stefano Arienti, Umberto Cavenago, Luca Vitone and Maurizio Arcangeli create highly self-referential art in various mediums, noteworthy for its combination of conceptual wit and attention to detail. At times their neatly poised work makes you think of Italian design and fashion.

For his novel York debut Kaufmann offered five floor statuarys and seven large-scale drawings, all addressing the human figure. The statuarys (untitled, as were the drawings) are life-size figures made of yielding leather--in designer colors of lipstick, r lime verdant and chocolate brown--whose chests can be uncloseed like Gladstone bags or women's purse Positioned singly or in twos the figures lay prone upon the floor, arms outstretched or holding the handles of their hold open chests. Inside the chest cavities, and sometimes upon the floor nearby, were cast-iron weights of the kind used for balance scales.

These "bag people" reappeared in several of the drawings in collection scenes suggestive of medical operations, while others recalled allegorical old-master sketches. Suspended in the middle of the gallery was a drawing of a skeleton, which dominated the installation like a circus ringmaster. All the drawings were execut in the unusual medium of silicon rubber upon tulle. Each piece of tulle measuring 118 inches square, was suspended from an aluminum slender stem with a second rod along the bottom to create a taut, painting-like surface. Unlike canvas, tulle is, of course, transparent, and in his studious installation Kaufmann used this transparency to great event manipulating the wall shadows in the way that that the play of opacity and transparency shifted according to the viewer's position. In individual work, two super-imposed layers of tulle created lively moire patterns as a background for a stack of figures. The format of the drawings moveed a film screen, and single could imagine the artist's mental imagery had, in result been projected onto the tulle

In the past Kaufmann's least felicitous work has been the greatest in quantity finished. The pattern was repeated here, where the drawings were far more intriguing than the statuarys Perhaps we've seen too many statuarys dealing with the human material substance in the last few years, or perhaps the impressive artisanry (by ready tailors) overwhelmed the metaphoric possibilities of the work, or perhaps the metaphor itself (weight as content) was simply too obvious. In any case, what the drawings promised, the plastic arts failed to deliver--but, after all, making promises is what first displays are about.

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