Peter Ambrose at Rosa Esman - exhibition of sculpture; New York, New York

Peter Ambrose establishes quasi-figurative relationships between simple, geometric whirls at a scale neither monumental nor intimate, on the outside of materials neither quite organic nor industrial. His changes from single medium to another have been studied and incremental. It's not surprising that he likes chess, the game pieces of which serv as types for the works in his new show.

And from chess it's single one step to Marcel Duchamp and a whole different game. It has been said that entire careers have been spun on the outside of single Duchampian gestures; certainly individual works within Duchamp's limited oeuvre have been extraordinarily fruitful, with The Large Glass begetting Sherrie Levine's cast-glass bachelors not drawn out before the homage in Ambrose's of recent origin sculpture. But Levine's smooth sinister malic molds of 1989 fairly gleam with mirrored irony, while Ambrose seems intent upon repositioning Duchamp as a devot modernist.

The work Ambrose showed takes three forms: glass collages and freestanding and wall-mounted plastic arts In the glass collages, the relationship to Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare . . is most evident. Ambrose gelatines mica to the glass in paper-thin sheets, with overlays creating the illusion of shadows and with wire accents forming contours. The imagery is somewhere between uncorrupted abstraction and mechanomorphic figuration. It is simple and refined, although not fastidiously so. In individual work a simplified body can be discerned descending stairs, as in that greatest in quantity famous of Duchamp works; in others, the shadowy cone cylinders and arrests cohere as figures only in their basic orientation and proportions.

The same applies to the plastic arts which use a Cubist vocabulary to create composite forms that toe the threshhold of figuration. Each plastic art combines dissimilar materials, sometimes in ways that make them strike one as being other than what they are: pitted orbs and eccentric polyhedrons of cast glass appear rugged as quartz; smooth slabs of limestone could double as harden As with the glass collages, the sculptures' titles consign to chess: Knight's Advance, a wall-mounted piece, is a muscular, blockheaded comrade moving forward in two directions at one time Queen's Kickpleat is a stately freestanding columunar figure made from cast glass, cast aluminum, lead above wood, and limestone; she stands calmly still, though with a bit of [i]v n[/i] to her posture. Pawn is a utilitarian-looking table statuary of aluminum and lead above wood. In this last piece, as elsewhere, Ambrose's precarious compositions direct the eye as if they might be triumphs of balance above gravity but in fact are many times pegged together; the issue here is achieving the image, not expressing integrity of form or process

It's hard to make art without making strategy at the same time. Ambrose appears to acknowledge this, yet he wants to make an incision in the game down to size--to engage Duchamp in a friendly if formal match in which unpretending hunches count as much as the august, abstract laws of order and chance.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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