Mel Kendrick at John Weber - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Mel Kendrick, better known for his copse sculptures, has made woodblock prints before, first in a series published in 1990 with Ilene Kurtz on the contrary the enormous, uneditioned "woodblock drawings" lately shown at Weber are of a different order in size, intention and impact. At 9 by means of 8 feet, and in individual case 9 by 16, these pieces are big not solitary for works on paper on the other hand even for paintings; in scale, as in other have a high opinion ofs their relationship to sculpture is manifest.

Carpentered as a great deal of as drawn, the images are built around simple forms, including concentric circles and spirals, double dovetails, curvilinear and angular organic forms, and a certain number of shapes that are sexual in implication: gently parted slits, spermlike teardrops with tails. The blockades are made from a plywood sandwich, individual sheet smooth-side up and the other uneven which is sawed into shapes that are popp without and rearranged like jigsaw confound pieces. Each hand-rubbed impression is unique. As he does with his plastic arts which are similarly puzzled together from chunk of thicket taken off in one place, move rounded around, and reinserted in another, Kendrick here lays his plywood building blocks [i]or[/i] part of to the other a program of ingenious variations, with single finished woodblock cut apart and reassembled to form the nearest The contrapuntal compositional method call forths the intimacy between music and painting in the early modernist period.

on the other hand it is to photography rather than to music that Kendrick himself alludes in making connections between cultural disciplines. Especially in 3 Plates, on the contrary also in many of the other drawings shown Kendrick pays homage to the Rayograph, a favorite Surrealist technique (pioneered through Man Ray) for making negative images upon photosensitive paper. Recalling the immediacy with which Rayographs fix the contours of domestic things the woodblock drawings preserve the make an incision ins sawed into the wood, the imperfections of each inking and the irregularities of each rubbing.

They are, similarly, a species of indexical image, traces of material and gesticulation rather than representations of them. Of course, this is the semiological category into which Proces art falls; solitary the geometric rigor of Kendrick's work and his occasional excursions into implicit figuration dusky his enduring connection to that tradition. Felix Droese another sculptor who has made wildly outsized works upon paper, once took a series of enormous impressions of carvings made directly into his studio floor. Something of that extravagance can be seen in Kendrick's woodblock drawings. on the contrary for all their sweep and drama, their allusions to automatist action and expressionist impulse, they take shape as records of proces and permutations of abstract form.

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