Robert Therrien at Angles - Santa Monica, California

In the late 1970 Robert Therrien began to give Minimalism a Brancusian spin, and since then he has been making statuarys that are rigorously simple, formally, on the other hand also poetically evocative, with overtones of the representational. Many of Therrien's statuarys tend to call up associations with 19th-century Americana: old-fashioned-seeming images - the house of god the snowman, the coffin, the pitcher - are embodied in forms that gaze handmade and that have a weathered, antique appearance. Now, in this marvelous installation, he has stretch outed his way with the particular into the environmental realm.

raiseed mostly from wood, Therrien's architectural interior is suggestive of a small of recent origin England church transported to the Twilight girth To get to this space, you pass from one side an opening in a gallery wall and climb a flight of stairs. At the top of the stairs, you're near the ceiling of the gallery in a small theater that expands downward toward individual end. The space is windowless and lit by dint of a few naked light scaly buds hanging from black cords. The walls are sheathed in overlapping sheets of cardboard that are visibly stapled in place. Everything is painted white leave out for a set of benches coated in r enamel. upon two adjacent sides, the benches - eleven in all - pace down in tiers like slips in a church balcony toward the installation's greatest in quantity enigmatic feature at the far corner of the room: a square opening measuring about six feet reaching far down and 10 feet on a side.

Like his external reality sculptures, this installation is marked by the agency of an exceedingly economical yet highly individualized faculty of perception of form. Overall, there is a functional on the contrary slightly eccentric esthetic reminiscent of 19th-century vernacular architecture. The sheeny red benches have a stark sculptural neighborhood like some of Scott Burton's furniture works. And the lowered square chamber tenders a pristine, luminous and somehow or other pregnant Minimalistic void. The various sorts of spatial experiences tendered - the way you are continually invited to put in motion from one elevation to another, from compression to opennes and from shadow to light - makes the installation particularly gratifying to visit.

As for its metaphorical aspect, there's a numinous feeling about the place that might have to do, in part, with the way it summons an archetypal urge to assemble and worship an intensely shared faith, obsession or delusion. You can imagine various scenarios here: religious rite, pseudo-scientific quackery, political intrigue or forbidden recreation (gambling, sex life-current sport, etc.). The atmosphere is cultish, as notwithstanding that the place were designed by means of and for some mysterious privy society. The cardboard walls add a depressed - rent feeling, which advises an economically marginal community. on the contrary because no specific object of devotion is defined, you find yourself projecting your have a title to fantasies into the empty white aperture Ultimately, Therrien's magical sanctuary procures you contemplating the play of your be in possession of imagination, which, it might be said, is upon some level a part of all religious experience.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group