Garth Evans at Lori Bookstein

Garth Evans was born in England in 1934. His "carpet" sculptures gained international recognition in the 1970s with their gridlike structures in various materials--wood, rubber, steel, plastic sheeting, etc.--arranged on the floor in intricate patterns that deliberately resist easy comprehension. After moving to New York City in the early 1980s, Evans constructed small, visually complex plywood wall reliefs in which color and intuitive geometries emphasize the spatial relationship between sculpture and wall.

First impressions of the eight low floor works shown at Lori Bookstein Fine Art indicate a radical departure. Armed (1992-95) is a brown podlike form that could be a creature brandishing a blunt instrument or propelling itself across the gallery floor with a single crooked limb. The four budding stems of Milk (1993-95) grope uncertainly upward while the elongated, grooved carapace of Reach (1992-95) kicks and wriggles in a curious floor-hugging dance. These are challenging works, simultaneously engaging the viewer's attention and remaining distantly aloof.

With their earthy tones and shiny surfaces, the sculptures appear molded or cast. In fact, Evans tapes and glues together small triangular pieces of found cardboard, finishing with a coat of fiberglass resin. Traces of this process remain visible in fragments of text and tabs of brightly colored tape, which recall the pentimenti left by painters. In these pictorial references, as well as in the underlying geometry and technique, continuities emerge.

Painting has always been a significant influence on Evans's practice. Pollock and de Kooning inspired his early grids, and the 1980s wall reliefs were shaped by his experiments with water-color. After several of the sculptures on show were completed, Evans realized that the forms had been prefigured in a series of organic, visually potent collages he had made a decade earlier at the Yaddo art colony and then laid aside.

In the Yaddo drawings, Evans pushed himself to work spontaneously, and a similar impulse lies behind the recent works. Collaging cardboard in the round gives more freedom than working in traditional materials; it also results in sculptures that, like paintings, are all skin. The artist invites us to view the surface of sculpture--usually thought of in terms of its materiality, a substantive boundary between object and space--as a vehicle for illusion much like the more familiar environs of the picture plane. These reaching, groping primeval forms evoke, then, the esthetic journey we undergo when we use our senses to explore the inner nature of sculpture and painting.

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