Belligerently flat, as much about color as form, and essentially scaleless as Willard Boepple’s screenprint monoprints are, they nonetheless feel so right for a sculptor. Or rather, for this sculptor with his restless mining of the formats he takes into possession, and his ceaseless testing of assumptions before they in turn are allowed to take possession of him, to compromise his antipathy towards safe and settled taste. Worked in sets of open-ended chromatic variation, Boepple’s stencilled forms have been compared to origami for the way color forces new, or rather misreadings upon the viewer, with planes flipping and structures slipping into Escheresque contortions of tease. The sumptuous fields of color and their sometimes capricious mixes might remind us that Boepple had initially set out to be a painter, but his experiments with English master printer Kip Gresham starting in 2003 actually grew out of his sculptural obsession of the 1990s, those constructions in cast resin of otherworldly and yet eminently materialistic translucency. Boepple’s machine aesthetic, Boccioni-like in the dynamism of forms in space, evokes the fourth dimension through inherent trajectories of leverage and spring. DAVID COHEN
Willard Boepple: Monoprints is on view through August 1, 138 Tenth Avenue at 19th Street, 212 750 0949
Willard Boepple. 21.2..14 O, 2014. Monoprint, 16 x 26-1/4 inches. Courtesy of Lori Bookstein Fine Art