With this gallery-sized sculpture Loren Madsen took what I thought I knew of his work and turned it inside out. Whereas his earlier pieces seem to be about levitation, this one addresses compression. If other work celebrates various elegant denials of its aggregate weight, this one makes its own mass and the support of that mass its central feature. Compression here has its physical correlate—a weighty oak beam running the length of the whole piece—as well as more iconographic, even autobiographical ones: glimpses of a number of Madsen’s earlier sculptures are to be had. But the composite effect is greater than the sum of the parts. Madsen’s self-cannibalization proves nourishing both to him and to his audience.
The beam rests on a square grid in dark wood, set askew and elevated on legs about four feet off the gallery floor. At one edge of the grid the beam is sectioned and carved to form four rough arches, held aloft by four kinds of columns: one of stacked slate, a metal jack, a plain wooden pole, and a fat classical column of indeterminate order. The beam projects another four feet or so off this last pillar and flattens out in a gentle taper. On the floor, aligned with the traversing beam, Madsen has set up a two-sided sandbox. About midway down the length of the piece stands an odd-sized wood-and-stone trestle, highly finished and canted to lean toward the sandbox. Suspended from the ceiling above the mass of the piece are hundreds of monofilaments of differing lengths, the antigravitational connectors of some of Madsen’s more spectacular pieces of the past now become a “cloud” of translucent steel. In severing the ties that once bound his parts to an illusionist, sleight-of-hand ensemble, Madsen seems to be striking out into what for want of a better term could be called a “realist” vein. Uniformly abstract, his previous dependence on architectural support has been transformed into an independence that incorporates fragmented architecture.
Reversing the thrust of this relationship sets Madsen apart from many of his sculptor peers, who, in the press to detach their work from its environs, have chosen either to replicate (usually in miniature) those very environs, or to rely on the tremendous and inexhaustible anthropomorphic powers of statues big and small. For the rest, that beleaguered minority of sculptors exclusively concerned with abstraction, the temptation to make the inchoate manifest seems well-nigh irresistible, and so we have colonies of deeply felt form nesting about. More often than not these are the massive equivalents of those Modern paintings in which surface is mistakenly thought to equal content.
Material plays a role in Madsen’s mixed media sculpture, but one subservient to other, more communicative objectives.
—Richard Armstrong
