Page 35 - Studio International - January 1965

Pol Bury equipoise; of firm movements in defined spaces. It is
Neu/ colonnes en quacre morceaux, nonsense to regard Stankiewicz as an anecdotal com­
1964 mentator on contemporary life. His best pieces are as
80 cm. high
Lefebre Gallery strong and timeless as Etruscan or Sardinian sculptures.
It is an error, in the same sense, to think of John
Chamberlain's polychrome sculptures in terms of their
origins. Their origins-the remains of scrapped auto­
mobile bodies-are irrelevant. What is relevant is
Chamberlain's consistent baroque attitude which presses
him to organize very complicated sequences of coloured
forms in three dimensions. His penchant for gracious
colours-dusky rose, moss green, blues and scarlets­
gives a lyrical cast to his works.
Another artist using unorthodox materials-tent canvas,
wires and welded armatures-toward an almost classical
end is Lee Bontecou. Her reliefs are invariably strictly
controlled essays in spatial play. Their mysterious
character emanates primarily from her peculiar imagi­
nation, and only secondarily from the materials and
means of organization (which derive to a great extent
from cubist principles).
The other four artists in the exhibition represent more
radical departures in point of view. George Segal intro­
duces the realistic environment as a foil for his
apparitional white plaster figures. In the play between
the real (a whole corner of a cluttered kitchen, for
instance) and the almost-real, Segal makes a subtle
and compelling point. Since his figures are cast from
life, they are almost real. But not almost-real like wax­
work figures: Segal's characters are only summarily
defined, so that they might stand for anyone or any
presence thrust into the static world of objects. In the
commanding play upon verisimilitude in the figures,
Segal accomplishes so much that the 'real' environ­
ments are scarcely necessary.
Peter Agostini, whose plaster-cast balloons. pillows.
and still-life materials play also upon the subtle differ­
ences between the 'real' and the imagined, comes closer
in sensibility to the surrealists. His play with con­
tradictions (soft stuff made hard, and vice versa) is
designed to rouse the same quick juncture of alien
images as a good surrealist metaphor.
Mark di Suvero spreads his thoughts in spaces that
range wide, beyond the accustomed circumscribed
places for sculpture. Using heavy beams still bearing the
traces of their burdens (bridges? harbour pilings?), di
Suvero constructs strong images that belong not to the
salon but to the outdoor, manmade environment.
George Sugarman offers a specifically non-classical
vision. His laminated wood forms, painted brightly, are
posed in unlikely combinations and balanced in un­
accustomed schemes. The breakdown of conventional
ideas of harmony and counterpoint is final in his work.
With interest in kinetic sculpture steadily rising, Pol
Bury's exhibition at the Lefebre Gallery couldn't have
been better timed. It served to remind us that movement
in itself is of little interest, but when coupled with
fantasy, it becomes a component-one might almost formed in the imagination to do with the mysterious
say a material-that exercises tremendous magnetism. rhythms of bodily and mental interchange.
Bury's use of slow movement is neither mimetic nor Bury's fantasy, which is what distinguishes his work
abstract. That is, the soothing andante does not directly from that of the institutional schools of kinetic art,
suggest moving trees or heaving seas. as do certain moves with great fluency. Each of his thoughtfully
kinetic sculptures. but, on the other hand, it is not purely fashioned works is distinct and affecting in its own
mechanical. Each movement-say of smoothly polished peculiar way. Whether he defies gravity by having
balls on a tilted plane-seems governed by the neces­ weighty, elegantly stained and polished spheres move
sities of the ensemble of forms. If, in the attenuated, upward instead of down, or whether he plays with
almost imperceptible trajectories of his forms, Bury seemingly unmotivated random movements, as he does
suggests a metaphor, it is a metaphor quickly trans- in the profuse forest of small points that sway and cue
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