Duayne Hatchett, at the Royal Marks Gallery, deals in grim totems. His cleanly forged steel pieces are static, symmetrical along the vertical axis, and look for all the world like the idols of some machine cult. The bodies of Hatchett’s figures—they lend themselves to biomorphic reading despite the artist’s pronounced gift for abstract reduction—are composed of two units, one comprising the head and chest, the other a leg-like base.
Hatchett favors a constant relationship, namely the circle side by side. The upper unit is frequently based on this double formation, signifying, possibly, eyes, breast, pectoral or dorsal areas. Sometimes this configuration is framed in a still larger simple unit; sometimes the circles are replaced by a horizontal aperture, like a mail slot, or the gun turret of a tank; sometimes a huge maw is poised open, displaying a dentellation of stubby cylindrical forms like a row of tusks. The industrial memory is strongly marked. We meet this torso-with-eyes in quite other contexts: as dead-end street lamps or as train signals.
Hatchett’s imagery is powerful, well-executed, yet it remains overly solemn. The masters before him are Smith and Lipchitz, though Hatchett’s brute industrialism at first hides this derivation. The works are singularly bad-humored. They are very much on guard. But, that they are uncharitable is not their failing. They are, after all, despite their austerity, related to a world of familiar forms, and it is this fact, above all others, that makes them, for all of their knowing liturgical coldness, dull.
The Kornblee Gallery announcement, elegantly set up in slim Futura type and preening itself in a Thirties-ish way on a glossy ground of canary yellow and white, may well be, despite the exhibition’s quasi-abstruse title, the single most impressive work connected with an otherwise underdone group-show.
—Robert Pincus-Witten
