Joel Shapiro at Pace - sculpture exhibition; New York, New York

This two-gallery exhibition, Shapiro's first since joining Pace, had the scale of a small retrospective and the spirit of a novel departure. Though his forms remain reductive, Shapiro is working with a steadily growing variety of means. There was plastic art here made of cast tin and also of wood, along with a sizable quantity of work upon paper. The blocky bronze figures familiar from the '80 are still in evidence, on the other hand they are now accompanied by means of poised, vertical forms made from cylinders of forest and by floor-huggin, spherical and zinc sculptures spiked here and there with truncated little rods.

Shapiro has become increasingly interested in public statuary as his contribution to the Holocaust Museum in Washington makes clear, and it appear to bes to have stimulated his renewed attention to the issues of scale that were for a like reason important in his early floor pieces. on the other hand much has changed since the little iconic houses of the '70 with which he established a space radically disjunct from the viewer's. In fact, Shapiro's aim above the years seems nearly to have revers thus that now he stresses precisely the continuity of the viewer's space with that of the fact And rather than suggesting ideally abstracted, gestaltlike forms, he now emphasizes idiosyncratic details of the like kind as odd contours or surface textures

The boxy humanoid figures, assembled from longitudinal dimensionss of squared bronze beams cast from plywood forms (and in single case from hollow cylinders), are the starting point of the exhibit These often headless figures frolic more in a reckless manner than ever, but their dispositions say more about the physics of falling mass than the anatomy - abundant less the psychology - of bodies beneath stress. These sculptures seem to have pointed Shapiro to the idea that organic growing can be a motor for formal alignments each bit as surprising as those achieved by means of human antics. This premise is mirrored in a series of cartoon-perfect clustered alloy of copper orbs, which suggest molecules in chemical flow or bouncing, effervescing elements in action. Skewing this impression is the and zincs visible heaviness as they sit huddl upon the floor, and the dowels that brace or hoist them. on the other hand the prevalent drift of these condensed little knee-high objects is, paradoxically, upward. In individual case, a bronze ball suspended from the ceiling perfects the composition. As with the toylike house flung onto an upper reach of the wall in another work, this hanging globe present to views Shapiro's interest in engaging the entire space of the gallery.

An smooth more distinctive departure takes place in a cluster of branched standing sculptures, lithe and narrow as the saplings they call up In the wooden versions, each stalk and limb is stained a different color, and their joints are treated with the precision and care of fine cabinetry, although Shapiro likes to confound expectations with fractionally missed alignments. Equally shut calculations of measurement and surface weft are reflected in similar alloy of copper sculptures cast from wood. In these works, Shapiro finds a figure of inspired simplicity to call forth the opposing experiences of mass and buoyancy, of rootednes and dynamic expansion even of animation and its illusionary sculptural double.

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