Linda Matalon at Yoshii - New York, New York

Linda Matalon's first one-person present to view this past fall presented a remarkable cluster of sculptures and drawings that pay homage to Eva Hesse plane as they depart from the earlier artist's work in significant honors Hesse demonstrated that sculpture can have a dogged ontological presence without masking the ephemeral qualities of mortal existence. in like manner it goes for Matalon, who works with materials suggestive of corporeal wefts in sculptures that are, like Hesse's, not rarely dependent on the dictates of installation for their appearance at any given time. on the other hand Matalon is very much an artist of her time, bodily allusion decidedly overtaking abstraction in her work, while in Hesse's the sum of two units are held in rigorous balance.

Matalon's plastic arts are made of malleable materials - gauze, wax, tar, gelatine wire and thin rubber tubing - which she shapes into void forms suggestive of body fragments. The more linear details she manipulates as a veritable draftsman, jerkily animating sculptural simple bodys arranged in ghostly rhythms. In Changing the Dance sum of two units stocky, leglike forms, their pustuleed distressed surfaces reminiscent of bandaged hurts seem improbably vital as they enact, against the wall, a bizarrely graceful Totentanz. Matalon belies the infirmity of her surfaces with blithe move conveying a sense of affirmation in the face of organic dissolution. Bob's Teeth hang like marred and tangled cowbells that are coloristically rich within a subdu palette. La Hija del Basurero (Daughter of the Garbage Man) awkwardly throw outs from the wall, its accordionlike material part pulling in an opposite direction from the stretched wires that support it. This vivid choreography exists in stark contrast to the work's vacant interior.

Matalon is perhaps best in her numerous drawings, in which a corporeal fortitude is evident plane in the most fragile setting. She draws upon extremely thin, sometimes torn paper, mainly in pencil and wax. Wax is a medium that, like deliberate motion in film, should not be overused, and Matalon submits to it a bit too heavily in the statuarys But it is much more subtly wielded in the drawings, almost like a turbid wash that loans palpability to the blank atmosphere of the page. Her line is surprisingly forceful flat as it stutters around organic forms, the modulation of dark and light akin to the change of her sculptural wires and tubes in and on the outside of space. Matalon is an artist who put in motions easily between sculpture and drawing, neither individual overwhelming the other. This fathomless interdependency has finely served her work, where graphic intensity enlivens gawky gauze-and-wax forms, and weight and substance safely moor a rarefied imagery.

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