Peter Reginato is a renowned sculptor whose show this summer at Adelson Galleries, now in its final week, marks his painting debut. Painting, that is, as a noun not a verb for this notoriously polychromatic welder and assembler  has been painting with aplomb for his whole career—it’s just never been on a flat surface until now. You could say he is like a reporter turning to the novel (the subtitle of his show is “fiction”) or vice versa–think Capote’s In Cold Blood. As if to underscore the fluidity of mediums, this visually raucous installation of densely hung canvases is rounded out by several sculptures. These include three unpainted table-top works in stainless steel that almost serve as a key to the figural and structural vocabulary of the paintings: Season at Coole, for instance, reads much like a rock or jazz band putting out at full-throttle. The paintings compensate for lack of (literal) spatial volume by maxing out volume in the audio sense. The noisiness of  Vibe, 2015 takes on a new clarity when we think in concert terms. Each of the formal elements – the surface, the structure, the shape motifs, the gestalt – is like an individual player, competitive yet miraculously connective, straining to give his all in a finale that’s riotous, orgasmic and inexorable.

Exhibition on view through August 21 at 730 Fifth Avenue, 7th Floor, between 56th and 57th streets.

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Peter Reginato’s gutsy, boisterous assemblages mate the mediums of sculpture and painting.  It would simply be insufficient to describe the components of his collages in steel as colorful.  Welded sculptural form becomes the unlikely support for what would anyway be a dense, involved composition were it contained within the politely conventional dimensions of a stretched canvas.  Instead, Reginato’s drunken brush sallies forth across arabesques of looping rods, mask-cum-shield punctuated oval forms and organic shapes that migrate in the course of the sculpture from amoeba to a leaf from Matisse to a cartoon animal cutout.  Reginato’s wildness – whether of hue or  juxtaposition – only temporarily blinds the discerning eye to what are actually thoughtfully rich cocktails of curve and chroma.

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October 14th – Nov 12, 2005

These artists have known each other for over thirty years. The exhibition is a combination of intensely colored paintings and sculptures that embody different world views. Ronnie Landfield attempts to transcend the material world by avoiding representation while Peter Reginato celebrates an abstract materialism. The title of the exhibition, “Color Coded”, is a pretentious way of saying, “The artwork is colorful!” This reduces the art to interior decor. It was a mistake for the artists to permit such a crass packaging of their work.

In his writings about his own art Ronnie Landfield tells us it is about the expression of transcendent, universal themes, and his tools are “color, space, and form.” On occasion his paintings are mildly suggestive of the meeting of earth and sky. His work has been consistently non-figurative for many years. These seemingly improvisational paintings are filled with subtleties and suggestive of large open spaces.

Ronnie Landfield’s impersonal formalism avoids specificity of place and time. Clearly they are not figural in any way, a tribute to the artist’s discipline and strong commitment to what he believes paintings should be about. Certainly they emphasize such formal elements as color and form. They are an examination of color relationships, which have existed throughout the painterly tradition. The drama they generate is solely due to the clashing and melding of beautiful colors in a palpable non-space. They are also about universal and religious themes, endless vistas and imaginary spaces, manufactured and natural light, the timeless image of the meeting of earth and sky (which is a favorite theme of Helen Frankenthaler, another great Lyrical Abstractionist), and fragile and ephemeral textures generated by overlap and juxtaposition of colors.

Landfield’s disciplined focus on the formal qualities of painting perhaps limit the power of these works to generate metaphors that complicate the viewing experience as it occurs through time. However, these images consistently maintain a level of non-specificity, while at the same time they are redolent of the outdoor world. I did not feel like I was looking at an interior at any point. The open sky always felt present. We are left wondering about the where and when of these interactions of colors and forms in space and this universalizes the language of abstraction. There is an inherent contradiction between the artist’s emotional connection to these colors and tones, the intricate meanings they have for him and him alone, and his avoidance of the anthropomorphic, the blatantly symbolic. Unlike a different branch of painterly abstraction, we don’t play guessing games with these works. We don’t feel the need to discover repressed or distorted signs and symbols. Landfield puts all of his faith in color, color as a vehicle of communication.

Peter Reginato’s sculptures are chock full of individual parts, welded together and painted with bright colors or mid-tones. The artist is an avid collector of lunch boxes and clocks and his love of the minutiae of the material world shines through. The horizontally oriented floor sculptures are a combination of the spread out innards of a busted clock and an exploded Joan Miró painting. Reginato’s vocabulary of forms grows out of his deep appreciation of the Moderrnist masters. A number of Peter Reginato’s sculptures were unforgivably placed on a shelf above a desk at the back of the gallery. This limited the viewer’s ability to see them in the round, the way they should be viewed. Although the coloration of these steel works is completely seductive, sometimes you felt like the sculptural forms and the colors laid on them were warring with one another. The floor sculptures could feel compressed, like the multiple layers, the overlapping of forms were not articulated enough. The originality of these floor sculptures is obvious though.

The viewer is initially disoriented by the weird gravity they exist in. How should one position oneself in relation to the sculpture? By not setting up a clear relationship between sculpture and viewer, the viewer ends up meandering about the work, focusing and refocusing on the colors and forms but never quite sure of which way is up. This completely undermines all Modernist notions of the isolated sculptural object. So the inherent contradiction in this work, the artist’s obvious appreciation of Modernist pods and squiggles and his desire to disorient us through an entirely intuitive building process makes these sculptures as strange as they are beautiful.

“Salmon Hill” is a successful sculpture from 2003. The multiple sections are welded together in such a way that they form a cone or tepee shape. The dark spaces visible through the myriad of forms cut out of the larger pieces of steel are mysterious and suggestive. The coloration of this sculpture is subtle and smart.

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Aleš Veselý: Infinite Point: Works on paper & studies for sculpture at Carosso Fine Art through September 25 (42 E 76
New York, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212-744-5400)

Wim Delvoye in Madison Square Park at 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue, and at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Fifth Avenue at Central Park South (organized by Public Art Fund, 212-980-4575)

Peter Reginato is that rare thing, an abstract maximalist. In 1970, at age twenty five, the Dallas-born welder was included in the Whitney annual. He betrays his vintage in terms of formalist sensibility and ambition, but he bucked a prevailing trend that led most of his contemporaries along an inevitable road to reduction. His avowed aim to make art that’s “as full as possible,” is amply borne out by his work, with its “everything but the kitchen sink” exuberance. A small show of recent pieces in a courtyard at the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers is definitely worth an excursion.

At first sight, a Reginato looks as if David Smith, the giant of post-war American sculpture, has come back to life and joined forces with a gang of Bronx graffiti writers. The eye swiftly adjusts, however, to Mr. Reginato’s brashness of line, form and color: There’s a classic sense of order amidst his goofy, cartoonish shapes and textures. Calder and Miró help inspire his nursery humor. A less obvious artist who Mr. Reginato brings to mind is painter Elizabeth Murray, although it is possible both artists simply looked to common sources in the common culture rather than at once another.

“Area 51” (1999), at over ten feet high and even wider, is the most ambitious piece on show. It is at once daring and refined. Shadows are artfully orchestrated to form a fugal second subject while color is at once garish and effete. Like most of his works, it is essentially figural, though more in disposition than detail. It keeps company with several other distinct pieces of comparable scale. Unfortunately, a few fussy little pieces cluster an outdoor corridor, a distraction that mildly mars an otherwise handsome installation. The courtyard which plays host to these sculptural antics keeps pace with the cross-cultural identity of Mr. Reginato’s aesthetics, as it is formed where a brutalist concrete museum extension meets a Victorian mansion. The sculptures’ daring colors stand out nicely against the browns and ochres of concrete and pebble.

Minimalist or maximalist, Mr. Reginato shares with the leading lights of Sixties sculpture (Anthony Caro, for instance, and his acolytes) the conviction that the modernist Jones’s to keep up with are painters. Rather than merely looking to great paintings for inspiration, or adopting color as a strategy to make sculpture cool and cerebral, however, Mr. Reginato goes full hog: he is a painter, using sculpture as his support.

This will sound paradoxical, for Mr. Reginato is very tactile, a worker in the round with a genuinely volumetric understanding of form. But the degree of painterly activity in his work transcends the mere adding of color to sculpture. Separate components are busy with painterly incident, with delicate, considered, autonomous color schemes, with evidence of pentimenti (creating a texture out of decision-making the way expressive painting does) and with a surface life of its own. Mr. Reginato’s genius is to reconcile these highly involved surfaces with the sculptural whole. A true collagist, he speaks the language of modernism with a post-modern accent. This is what makes him such serious fun.

***

When it comes to Czech sculptor Aleš Veselý, “serious fun” takes on a whole different meaning. His is a lugubrious brutalism to offset Mr. Reginato’s subtle whimsy, but underlying the drama and pathos of his hefty, tragic vision there is definitely wit, however Kafkaesque. Mr. Veselý has enjoyed international if underground recognition since the 1960s when his early forays into neo-dada were discovered by the French critic Pierre Restany. He has been head of the Studio of Monumental Art at Prague Academy of Fine Art since 1990, and has completed a number of prestigious public commissions in Europe, often at Holocaust sites. His penchant for rusty steel and ominous rocks held in suspended tension serves well to memorialize totalitarianism.

His current show at Carosso, extended through September, focuses on plans for monuments. Many are so ambitious as to be barely tenable. The pioneer modern sculptor Henri Gaudier Brzeska once exclaimed “I want to carve mountains”; Mr. Veselý has taken this somewhat literally to heart. In one scheme, for instance, he is to carve a perfect triangle out of the top of a mountain in Israel (where many of his schemes are projected) and fill it with a meteorite-like boulder. Another idea is his Kadesh Barnea Monument. Those who know their bible will recall this as the spot where the “wandering” Israelites settled for forty years. Mr. Veselý proposes a colossal Magen David, one triangle of which is defined by a twenty foot high steel canopy, the other a wedge of concrete of similar proportions resting on top of it. The viewer (not for the feint hearted) standing beneath the slab can look up to the sky through a cone carved through the slab, and, similarly, down into the ground beneath through another cone.

A weird amalgam of fantasy and practicality animates these ludicrous schemes, lending them metaphysical humor. They are drawn in a hand that recalls the modern mannerist Paul Wunderlich. Inevitably such “off the wall” megalomania will bring to mind the American Claes Oldenburg, only without the pop connotations (or the likelihood of realization). His fascination with slabs impregnated with voids also bring to mind the Indian Anish Kapoor. But what is refreshing about Mr. Veselý’s imagination is the heavy hint of earnestness that gives his sculptural fantasies truly ambiguous edge. He is a kind of Dada Michelangelo.

* * *

Would that a pinch of ambiguity could be spared for the neo-conceptual ornaments that pass as sculpture in the hands of Belgian Wim Delvoye. His work is currently sited at Madison Square Park and Doris C. Freedman Plaza at Central Park, part of a series of exhibitions organized by the Public Art Fund (the plaza is named for the fund’s founder, incidentally). This exhibition is essentially a one-line joke. He has objects like a caterpillar truck or such construction site bric-à-brac as traffic cones or a heap of sand fabricated for him in gothic filigree. There is such a patronizing obviousness to it all, as in “Do you get it? Modern technology, medieval craft”; the work invites a despondent “What do you expect from public art?” If the self-appointed arbiters of sculptural taste had a modicum of understanding about the medium they claim to represent they’d send these pseudo-intellectual tchochki packing and give our parks some real sculpture. Let Peter Reginato tease us with his 3-D grafitti, or have Mr. Veselý threaten us with his slabs and voids.

A version of this article first appeared in The New York Sun, August 7, 2003

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