Reviewed: Martin Puryear, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, until May 9th (01-6129900), writes Aidan Dunne
The Constantin Brancusi exhibition at Tate Modern in London is called The Essence Of Things, a phrase excerpted from the artist's comment about abstraction and reality: "They are imbeciles who call my art abstract; that which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior form but the idea, the essence of things." The title could be applied to Martin Puryear's exhibition at IMMA. In his work he uses the language of abstraction, but he never loses contact with the real.
Although his work has not been seen in Ireland before, Puryear has a long and distinguished international record as a sculptor. Born in Washington DC in 1941, he studied art at the Catholic University of America and did a master's in sculpture at Yale. He is described as a post-minimalist sculptor. You can immediately see why. Although his work recalls the familiar forms of minimalism, at a fundamental level it incorporates and is open to other layers of interpretation. It displays a continual, ambiguous play on shapes that might be human or in some other way organic, for example, or they could equally be utilitarian vessels.
One thing is for sure, though. His sculptures and prints are beautiful. He has a tremendous eye, and feeling, for form, a knack for distilling complex masses of visual information into elegantly concise images. It helps that he is completely in tune with his materials and processes, so that there is an easy fluency to everything he does - not in the sense that it is easy, but because everything works together. There is nothing facile about even his most reduced, streamlined forms: a spare, linear etching has a thoughtfulness, a gravity and a density.
Sometimes what he makes, in three dimensions or two, has what might legitimately be called a purity of form that evokes the abstraction of mathematics. Although his aquatint Three Holes might refer to a domestic vessel, it could as easily be read as an exercise in spatial geometry, specifically topology, which seems to fascinate him.
But all of this tends more and more towards an emphasis on abstraction. What of the real? The real finds its way into the constitution of his sculptures and prints in a number of ways. It is there in terms of imagery, certainly. Decoy, from 1990, one of a substantial series of works, is recognisably related to carved wooden decoy birds.
Characteristically, Puryear abstracts the form without sacrificing the association but also allows a widening of reference in the utilitarian floorboard pattern of the ponderosa pine boards and the jointed sections of the neck of the "bird". He also introduces a question: Which aspect of what we see is a decoy?
On The Tundra, made about five years previously, is an amazing, relatively small piece in cast iron. Although it obviously, in fact uncannily, depicts a watchful bird perched on a stone, physically it consists of two minimal, intersecting forms cast in one piece. His instinct for material comes through here. The bird is not heavy, but its look is. The dense, brooding presence of the sculpture relates to the raptor's dominating gaze. Bird and landscape are physically bonded to each other. All of this is achieved with great subtlety.
The real is also present in pieces such as Confessional and Hero in less specific, more free-form, metaphorical ways than in On The Tundra. The truncated mesh and tar oval of Confessional could be a schematic head. It's "face", with playful versions of orifices and other features, surmounts a low wooden platform on which to kneel, as in a confessional. Immediately this configuration of ambiguous ideas opens up several lines of interpretation without entailing any one, correct reading.
Equally with the swollen, phallic form of Hero, again one of a series of comparable pieces, close relations of the decoys. The form is phallic, but not simply or straightforwardly; it also allows several other readings in its slightly mocking evocation of the heroic.
Then there is his startling use of a huge ampersand captured within the framework of the outline pitch-pine Vessel, which suggests the futility of limits and containment. Vessel is seductively well made, with a relish for the business of fabrication. Puryear is known for his mastery of a number of craft disciplines. He has travelled extensively and studied several traditional skills, including joinery in Sierra Leone and furniture-making in Sweden.
The way these and other disciplines are integral to the formation of the work is in itself an insertion of the real into the domain of minimalist abstraction. Equally, the hand-made quality of the processes can disrupt the idea of smooth seamlessness associated with modernity and high technology. But Puryear never fetishises or pastiches craft skills. He simply uses them.
He's quoted on this point in the catalogue. Referring to his experience of Japanese craft and its underlying philosophy, he notes that he is wary of the idea of technical perfection. "It's important to also have a flow . . . and not get caught in the trap of perfection." And the term flow is particularly appropriate to his work.
