Ron Klein at Pentimenti - Philadelphia

Three large inflatable sculptures dominated the main gallery space in Ron Klein's show of sculptural work from the last two years. Even the two floor-based pieces seemed to hover like dirigibles: one, black and sleekly pointed at both ends, and over 25 feet long; the other, fatter and blunter, and covered by the gray-and-white carapace of a silk parachute. The smaller back room was crowded with scaled-down pieces, which seemed to have picked up density and psychological charge along with their diminution in size. A grapefruit-sized ball of woven hair; a black-painted sponge affixed to the wall; on the floor, a pair of objects like oversized shaving brushes, the tips of their crew-cut bristles dyed red--these items exuded an aura of fetishism, even of some shamanistic magic based in natural materials.

For some years, Klein has traveled to locales where subsistence and traditional craft are still organically linked, including Burma, Madagascar and some Aegean islands. He returns to his studio with materials and objects both found and commissioned (fishing nets made to his specifications, for example), which find their way into his finished art work. Some of his repurposings transform the original materials completely, as when pieces of black-rubber shock absorbers from Burma become part of a skinny, stacked tree form (When We Were Tall, 2000-01). Others, like the pointed Asian peasant hat riding one inflatable like an acorn top, emerge with little punch-line shocks of recognition.

Black (along with a few other neutral shades) is the strongest unifier of all the different works here. But it functions in two different ways: both as a kind of modernist leveler, erasing social context and reducing things to their formal values, and also as a way to heighten the materiality and obsessive strangeness of the finished objects. This duality can be disconcerting, and it points up what can be felt as an awkward bipolarity in Klein's working method, as he oscillates between an interest in shapes per se (to the distilled extreme of the inflatable teardrops and seed forms) and an attraction to the cultural or material associations inhering in things. Nearly 20 years after the Museum of Modern Art's "`Primitivism' in Twentieth Century Art," it's no longer enough, or even perhaps acceptable, simply to extrapolate formal interest from third-world sources.

Klein's own obsession with his retrieved materials, as evidenced in his repetitive stringing, winding and other additive techniques, may reflect a search for an intuitive answer to the riddle of connection among the elements of shape, material and meaning. Without ever arriving at a resolution, these works achieve an undeniably compelling presence and afterimage.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group