Tom Bills at B. Sakata-Garo

The sculptures Tom Bills showed here were substantially smaller than his usual fare. All new, the 14 works included are approximately 2 to 3 feet high and insistently frontal--meaning in this instance that they can be viewed from front or back but are functionally two-dimensional, offering no real side view. They were all done in steel, his signature medium, which he cuts with an acetylene torch in a process he likens to carving stone. Bills sees little difference between a slab of steel and a block of stone and considers the flame a shaping tool that releases the figure.

Many of the works are, as usual, rich in flaking patches of rust, but, in a departure for the artist, several are also highly polished. In these, the light interacts with the brushy, expressionist patterns on the surface--the residuum of the process--and mass, touched and retouched, dissolves in its own sheen, becoming more buoyant. Bills has taken minimalist-style sculpture and toned down its toughness and intransigence without losing immediacy or force. His shapes, intuitively derived, can be as forceful as those of his Minimalist predecessors, but they are also more vulnerable, their formality jostled by a self-deprecating humor. These chunky small fry, placed on the floor and on pedestals--lower than eye level--combine modernist geometry with referential abstraction. For instance, Ester, Edsel and Cowboy Dreams--solid, sturdy floor pieces--might suggest feisty figures, tongue-in-cheek monuments to anti-heroes, or the triumph of the little guy.

In another departure from Bills's usual practice, almost every work here encompasses a void of some kind, so that the authority of steel is violated and the interior of the sculpture revealed, from the fist-size hole in Esterto the openness of the silvery Monkey See, which is almost all oval-rimmed space, like a mirror frame with the looking glass removed. This last configuration is repeated in Lucky Day and Carry That Weight, but in all three works Bills resists the fluidity of the classic oval, preferring to leave the contours rough, as cut by the acetylene torch, rather than completely smoothed. The effect is to slow down the eye as it travels the curve. Carry That Weight could just as well serve as the title for this show and its cast of heavy objects leavened only by the introduction of space.

Other works in the exhibition appeared more landscape-oriented, such as Whale Sighting or Backbone, both of which are horizontal. Cut through, their mass is punctured in both cases by an extended sliver of curvilinear space that suggests a drawing. Another horizontal work is the handsome Eye of a Wing, with its central oval-shaped void, balanced on either side by matching oval solids. Bills's sculptures are strikingly self-sufficient, still based squarely on mass, space and material rather than on the niceties of installation or context. Laconic, deceptively unassuming and structurally clear, these works have a straightforward factuality that ultimately carries the weight of their conviction.

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group