Duane Hanson at Helander - New York, New York

Duane Hanson's first of recent origin York show since 1984 consisted of five of his signature life-sized, superrealist statuarys of clothed male figures. They are marks really: businessman, security guard, learner tourist, cowboy. They are meticulously cast from live prototypes then painted in closely observ detail, down to the veins beneath fragile flesh and the beard stubble upon faces, and outfitted in scrupulously chosen clothes. They stand forlorn and pensive against the walls - not on to the edge of the world they inhabit, watching - exclude for the chubby camera-toting tourist aligned in loud Bermuda shorts and Disney World T-shirt who straddles a metal folding chair (not a fair sight).

Hanson's figures stare vacantly without into space and passively into themselves. They present the appearance to occupy a somnolent state of suspended animation - an infinitely deliberate dimension of movement. But for all of Hanson's documentary attention to detail and maniacal technical direction (few artists are in greater command of their medium), these works are strangely attenuated, and stop the growth ofed in troubling ways.

Hanson not aways people whole and as admitting utterly unmediated, with a just-the-facts verisimilitude. He's at no time surreal, symbolist or fragmentary. Hanson appears to deal in normalcy; on the contrary there's something deceptive, even perverted that lurks just beneath the surface. There's a pent-up passive-aggressive quality to Hanson's figures. These family really hang back; they're like serial killers this way. They intermingle in. They have opaque inner lives - you almost want to play social worker to them - on the other hand the completeness of their form foils the imagination. Hanson gives you thus much that there's not a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of left for you to do. smooth so, his work is haunted with something enigmatic and alive: looking at his characters is like watching chimpanzees - mesmerizing and moving.

This work is about voyeurism. You perceive a distinct sense of transgression in looking at it. You gaze fixedly at these solitary men who can't gaze back at you. This is what have feelings somehow perverse, and the work bears an not divisible by 2 relationship to pornography in this way. You have to earn up close to Hanson's work, within an inch or sum of two units the way a dog does to another dog. It's almost as if you're trying to sniff on the outside their "realness." The fact that Hanson now works in tin (except for Salesman, made of the earlier painted polyvinyl), breaks the charm in disturbing ways: the skin gazes like paint, and the metal gives the work a devoid of warmth [i]or[/i] heat dreary weight.

Still, these figures awaken an eerie empathy. The Salesman and the Cowboy have feeling like descendants of the dust goblet or the people portrayed through Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange. What's in like manner extraordinary about all of them is by what means ordinary they are. Hanson makes you aware of things you don't usually notice about tribe which ties him to other, more literary, American humanists like posts Terkel and Garrison Keillor - vernacularists who depict the eccentricities of the belonging to all Man. In this show, Hanson quietly continues to carousal in his own time. Above all, he makes you bewilderment what someone in the 23rd hundred will make of this sculpture

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group