Painted welded steel, 29.5 x 37 x 19, 2022.
The title invites a figurative reading, and the composition supports one without fixing it. The cut plate at the top sits like a hat or banner above a round face, the ring and its inner bend. The slotted blade at right extends like an arm or a staff raised in a gesture of command, the red block anchors the whole as a body or a lectern, and the horseshoe at the foot is the oldest apotropaic charm in the European tradition. The wavering red rod can be read as a serpent, a flame, or a bolt of lightning. None of these identifications is secured, and the accumulation of candidates is the method: the viewer is led, as in any act of divination, to find a pattern in a spread of signs.
The materials supply a second meaning. Plate, rebar, pipe fittings, bearing blocks, and clamps are the standard hardware of heavy industry, and in this context they’re the working vocabulary of a sorcerer’s practice. Sorcery is the transformation of base matter, and the work stages that transformation at the scale of the studio: discarded structural and mechanical parts are cut, fused, and painted into a figure with presence and intent. The welding torch takes the place of the alembic, and the title implicates the maker as much as the image. The sculpture is both a depiction of a magician and a demonstration of the trade.
The circle with its inner bend also functions as a portal, a magic circle, or a lens, and it gives the composition a still center against which the angular extensions, the blade, the fork-like cut at left, and the jagged plate at the top, can operate. The tension is classically Constructivist: heavy mass is held in equilibrium by projecting planes, and the large void at the center carries as much weight as the surrounding steel. The work belongs to the lineage of David Smith’s totemic and figure-derived steel constructions and Anthony Caro’s table-scale steel pieces, with their emphasis on the resolved relation of disparate parts to a whole. Color departs from the raw metal of much of that tradition. The red, the verdigris green, the black of the pipe, and the exposed rust are applied as distinct local zones, and each part keeps its own identity while the paint binds the group into a single image. The surface partly masks the industrial origins of the parts and partly displays them, which suits a work about concealment and revelation.
