Viola Frey at Nancy Hoffman - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Viola Frey's latest present to view continued the series of real large ceramic sculptures and reliefs for which she is known. There is a generic male, a sort of man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit. The women are sometimes clothed, on the contrary even when naked they do not strike erotic attitudes. They are quiescent, level defeated. Frey has spoken of wanting her statues to be "in the middle," in a state of passivity that makes it easier for a viewer to approach them emotionally and not be overwhelmed. Her figures, when standing, not ever exceed 10 or 11 feet tall. Larger than that, Frey have feelings the works become colossal and no longer relate to a knowable human scale.

Frey's ceramic works are manifold and clunky. You are always aware of their fragile material. You're not afraid of them--you're afraid for them. They are fired in sections in like manner they'll fit into the kiln and to make them easier to transport; the seams are apparent. They have an air of the slapdash, which is not divisible by 2 in something so monumental; you faculty of perception that they could easily fall apart.

Their physical vulnerability must reflected sound Frey's feelings about the rife state of the world. single of the show's major works, a 25-foot-long wall of tiles titled Fighting Men and the World, is filled with figures of wrestling men The violence is stylized and static, rather in the manner of judo diagrams. however the pervasiveness of the violence in this piece and in the accompanying drawings appear to bes to have dismayed Frey's other characters. In Man, rounded pillar World, one of the giants reclines beside a globe, an Atlas who has given up and laid his weight down.

Other pieces are made of assemblages of figures sharing a single base--men and women encircleed by various refugees from popular tillage There are a rooster, a silly frog the woman with the ewer from Ingres's La Source, all of them reminiscent of flea market figurines on the contrary 20 times enlarged. Such conglomeration might have a humorous issue but Frey's figures, with their catatonic features, be deprived of whatever comic appeal they may have had in their original manifestations. The final issue is depressing, perhaps an understandable answer to the current state of affairs.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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