Bryan Hunt’s sculpture wavers between the natural, the architectural, and the figural. It may simultaneously evoke a waterfall arrested in bronze and a body stripped of flesh. “Fresh” and “rotten” mix as if they were forms. The work is about such paradoxes. The oppositions are the expected ones—volume and void. stasis and motion—but the real interest is the play of natural and cultural. In the drawings especially, these forms inflect this opposition: the waterfall (nature), the arch (architecture), and the quarry (a place “between” nature and culture, where natural material is extracted for cultural forms—for architecture, for sculpture).
The titles are clues to the figural ambiguity of the sculptures. Caryatid plays on the instability of form: this caryatid is a figure without support—the form wavers between the figural and the architectural (a column or arch). Similarly, The Cloak of Lorenzo is both figure, cloak, and neither; the result is a sculpted mood, a sinister night. Daphne, as the name suggests, evokes a metamorphosis of a figure into tree form. And Arch Falls falls precisely between the architectural and the natural.
Hunt is able to make his materials (mostly bronze and limestone) evoke many forms. Yet he only renders the forms as ambiguous—he does not make us rethink them. The sculptures remain “only” evocative, that is, “literary.” I do not mean that they are illustrative, rather, that they are closed by the very associations they evoke. Opposites such as motion and rest, the natural and the cultural, concerned the Greeks, and perhaps they concern us too, but not in the same form. This is the problem here: the sculptural language does not really re-form the questions. Like much post-modern architecture, this sculpture has more to do with the pre-modern: it is figural, thematic, on pedestals. And like much post-modern architecture, it seeks to re-connect The Tradition—to remember Rodin so as to forget (or at least get past) Carl Andre and Robert Smithson. Hunt’s airships, sleek zeppelins supported, it seemed, by elegance, interested me more: above us, without support, they dislocated our notion of sculpture. These arches, etc., seem more like throwbacks—intelligent, impressive, but throwbacks nonetheless.
—Hal Foster
