Downtown at the Park Place Gallery a two man show offers sculpture by Mark Di Suvero and paintings by David Novros. Di Suvero’s work is now sufficiently good that the inclusion of two rather playful pieces here does not detract from the essential gravity of his accomplishments. His New York Dawn: For Lorca is a massy accretion of “experienced” wood, beams, and bolts, cramped together in preservation of their sense of other, past functions and identities. Set lightly atop unobtrusive slender beams of black steel, two such elements warily approach one another. A thin steel pole topped with the menace of a longshoreman’s brutal tongs hangs in gravid suspended tension by means of wires anchored in the wooden elements. This simple arrangement has a cruel and Ernst-like animation strung up within its blocky suggestion of an environment.
The major piece of the show is The A Train. A vast combine of yellow painted steel struts and huge beams seems to thrust irrepressibly through the floor like an iceberg bounding to the surface of the sea. Above, suspended from the ceiling, is a mobile configuration of the same yellow steel and two long wooden beams. These are set at a wrenched and spread angle suggesting both lateral extension and powerful spatial torque. A fragmentary stairway of four sturdy open wooden steps dangles and spins from the larger overhead part, risking a scrape with the upward surge of the floor piece. The titanic forces expressed in the entire piece depend, in the most sensitive way, on the richness of directional suggestions present in the upper hanging section.
The two other large Di Suveros are both really outsized toys. Archimedes’ Dragon is a beamish orange steel rocker smiling like the bow of a newly rustproofed Liberty ship. At the end of a curved steel band is a heavy sheet-metal seat like that of a homemade tractor. The leather bands that make the backrest are thonged to a shaped steel frame quite protectively reassuring in its figurative allusion. Astride the seat the “observer” or whatever can roll and jog, making the piece travel on the floor, and become euphoric on the bouncing bucks of this squeaking, creaking monster.
Love Seat is a flexing serpentine steel tube painted that chartreuse that was “tout le rage” on 1949 Ford coupes. Tightly embraced in its coils are two automobile tires. The whole affair is suspended by chains from a swivel joint set in the ceiling. Placed at a convenient height, the tires invite perching and lolling. A good push and a little body English make for wild swinging in an exciting variety of twirls and arcs. Not the least of the attractions of the show is the gallery of emotions playing on the faces of those types who gingerly approach the piece and reckon just how much of their dignity would be compromised by having a go at it.
These goodnatured pieces enhance by their boisterous action the spatial concerns dealt with more soberly in the New York Dawn . . . and The A Train. Di Suvero’s best pieces show how a fine sculpture can lollop and dive through space, erupt through the floor, and bloom into the experience of extent, mass, direction, and energy that is highly original and full of subtleties without preciosity. These wonders are seldom worked.
David Novros’ paintings seem, unfortunately, pressed to the wall by the vigor and expansiveness of Di Suvero’s sculptures. Novros deals with groups of monochromatic shaped canvases set in groups. The panels are clean, geometric, and irregular, painted with vinyl lacquer pigments. 2:16 has metallic powder added to the paint and so a lustrous sheen plays over the big featureless surfaces. At this point Novros’ compositions reveal a pleasing ability to adjust his forms so that their suggested interactions are capable of further development and not unnecessarily static. But, apprehensively holding their feet off the floor, in this setting they appear to be haughtily ignoring Di Suvero’s high jinks, and hardly have a chance to be themselves. Unfair competition can be the only verdict.
—Dennis Adrian
