Linda Matalon at Cohan Leslie & Browne - New York - Brief Article

In her first solo exhibition since 1997, Linda Matalon showed three bodies of related work: frail sculptures made of wax and wire called "Axel," a slightly more robust series of sculptures cast in bronze called "Mettle" and a group of untitled drawings. They share an extreme, almost uncomfortable delicacy of touch and a tendency to reach across disciplines, the sculpture by a graphic reliance on line, the drawings with processes--layering, scratching, backfilling--that are nearly sculptural.

In the works on paper, various admixtures of beeswax are applied in thin layers that puddle and dimple, forming skinlike surfaces into which Matalon draws with further wax and also with graphite. The ghostly, pentimentolike marks nearly cohere into recognizable objects--a torso, a skull, vertebrae--but also suggest more abstract gaseous spheres and craggy boulders. Though neither gravity nor definable sources of light obtain, the drawings are remarkably substantial and luminous. Paradoxically, there is considerably less physical presence in "Axel," the attenuated forms of which seem to hover between three dimensions and one. Made of modest lengths of wax-coated wire, they are bent and knotted into nooselike figures, which are sometimes hooked together at the end, where the wax tends to clot. Their physicality seems further diminished by the glass vitrines within which they dangle, boxes that lend them a disturbingly contradictory sense of hapless menace. Even the "Mettle" works, dense as they are, seem pitted against a powerful force of erosion. Perched on pedestals, the diminutive bronzes are cast from clay pinched and pulled into shapes that defy identification, though it is possible to make out irregular horns, embryonic limbs, the odd utensil and even, in one curiously appealing sculpture, a fingertip rest for two adjoining digits.

A Cuban-American artist who began exhibiting roughly 10 years ago, Matalon has been associated with the legacy of Post-Minimalism, and her work--particularly earlier sculptures that paired gridded forms with allusions to body parts and functions--has several times been compared with Eva Hesse's. But the sculptures seem just as close to the work of such echt-modernist sculptors as Henry Moore, whose reclining nudes are almost comically shadowed in a few of the "Mettle" sculptures. Others suggest William Tucker plunged into doubt, his fragmentary bronze colossi collapsed into truncated limbs no bigger than a lump of coal. But most of all, it is the spirit of Alberto Giacometti that seems to preside over Matalon's work (perhaps, admittedly, because his was so gloriously on view concurrently at the Museum of Modern Art). Like Giacometti's, Matalon's drawings and sculptures reflect unflagging effort, by turns dogged, tender, angry and amused, to wrestle pure vision into tangible form.

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