A flashpoint between the senses

Low or bas-relief represents a kind of intermediary position between modes of seeing.  This has long been understood: to the nineteenth century theorist Adolf von Hildebrand, for instance, relief was a half-way house between things seen fully in the round and things compressed within a unified depth. 

The works in this two-person exhibition of Joyce Robins and Harry Roseman encourage a sense of relief as a flashpoint between the senses, a place where the visual and the tactile rub up against one another, where boundaries break down between pictorial space and sculptural form.  Shallow relief places an emphasis on surface, putting the eye into a pictorial mode of seeing, yet it has the integrity of a sculptural object, fully retaining a sense of facture and physicality.

Both artists are represented in this exhibition by work in fired clay, incorporating color at different stages of the process.  Roseman’s pictorial subject is drapery, explored in such motifs as drapes, curtains, and napkins, their titles often reflecting the humorous potential of the images.  “Raspberries and Cream,” for instance, captures the wrinkles and crumples of a gaudily pink spread-out twice-folded napkin.  At one level it is a very literal representation—it could almost read as an exact cast of its object—but on closer inspection reveals itself to be a minutely handcrafted representation of its subject.  Some works in the show leave shallow relief in favor of substantiality, while retaining their defining relationship to the wall: “Large Knot,” (2002) for instance, in styrofoam, wall compound and acrylic paint, which explores the bulbousness of fabric forced into a weighty shape.  Roseman also presents a wall installation of working fragments kept back from “Curtain Wall,” the artist’s large-scale commission at JFK Airport in 2001.

Robins, who elsewhere also works in bronze and installation, is represented here by twenty mostly recent examples of her quirky, small scale abstract ceramic wall hanging pieces. Usually circular or rectangular, though sometimes adopting a saddle or shield-like shape, these works play against the supporting wall.  Sometimes it is as if they are writhing or wriggling to be free of the vertical plane.  “Horizontal Bending Rectangle” (2006), for instance, curves outwards as if responding to heat from below.  “Red Turned Circle” (1999) hangs from its short bend to protrude at ninety degrees from the wall, reversing the usual relationship of front and side.  The surfaces of her work are often gridded with punctured holes or scoops, creating a shimmering sensation, and this is sometimes aided by a pointillist arrangement of little dots.  That the artist began her career as a painter comes across both in the complexity and involvement of the surfaces and in her acute awareness of the sculptural shape as a support.

While Robins and Roseman complement one another in defining a contemporary aesthetic of bas relief, the artists also spar with one another in this exhibition. There is almost an Ingres-Delacroix opposition, in which Roseman is the more classical and restrained, Robins the more romantic and voluptuous.  While obviously Roseman is more depictive, dealing with representation through the motif of drapery, and also deals increasingly with issues pertaining to painting and to do with color, Robins could be described as the more painterly, her non-representational mode encouraging a freer, more intuitive response to texture and color.  Unlike the politically-riven followers of Ingres and Delacroix, however, these are artists united in a sense of play.

David Cohen