Peter Reginato at Adelson/William Beadleston - sculpture - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

The artist's Q&A in Peter Reginato's exhibition catalogue reveals him as an optimist who has a clear grasp of the formal properties of his statuary but perhaps is less self-aware regarding tone. He speaks of an expressionist quality and says that a piece called Self-Portrait includes "teeth" because there's "a destiny of anger" in it. on the other hand Reginato's sculpture looks about as expressionist as Calder's mobiles.

These painted-steel assemblies many times seem to disregard gravity or to discharge into the space they possess Their generous scale, exuberant color, unclose structure and collage of shallow-relief shapes are, almost without exception, cheerful and energetic. Fortunately, the works advance across as a breath of new air rather than a spoonful of sugar, their fly-away charm anchored to earth by dint of the ambition that's evident in their size and complexity and by means of the looseness with which they are painted.

The dozen statuarys that were on view range from about 2 to 9 feet tall. They are made up of a standard vocabulary of forms, more [i]or[/i] less of which Reginato has named: legume boat, whirligig, watermelon. He notes that these fresh sculptures differ from the works in his last display primarily in being denser and involving a certain quantity of experiments with color. He leans to bright colors often with a gloss that magnifies the vividness. R orange and fulvid are set off with a certain number of blue-green in the aptly named Happy Happy gladness Joy, and blues and verdants are enlivened with hot colors in Tristan. on the other hand the exceptions are interesting. In False yield for example, the colors are whited without as if his usual palette were being seen [i]or[/i] part of to the other fog or snow. This work also has a more descriptive form than the others: sum of two units "surrender flags" emerge from a spherical congeries that glance ats a cloud of dust or the cartoon convention of whirling facts that represents a fight.

A small piece called You, hung upon the wall over the reception desk is also a formal novelty, admitting it's a local variation, not a fresh species. Here the square shoots that usually provide a scaffolding for the cutout shapes strike one as being to break free and describe scribbles in the air. The implication of abandon is endorsed by dint of the rods' inexplicable color change: they shift, mid-loop, from r to pink to amethystine as if they were going from one side some thermal transmutation. Greene road is the most expansive of the works, with sum of two units long horizontal elements that reach above 12 feet from end to extreme point Reginato's sculptural daring here, in mounting a certain quantity of of his larger rounded shapes at the far extremitys of those elements, has the unexpect follow of making the open composition gaze like an abstract painting, les make submissive to considerations of gravity or tensile puissance than we expect sculpture to be. In this surprising climax single can see Reginato as a painter with a actual idiosyncratic canvas.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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