Nicolas Carone, Sculpture
Lohin Geduld Gallery
531 West 25th Street
New York City
212-675-2656
May 12 - Jun 16, 2007
By JONATHAN BOYD
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untitled, undated carvings by Nicolas Carone
Courtesy Lohin Geduld Gallery
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When I mentioned Carone’s name an older painter friend of mine exclaimed, “You have to see the heads! It’s as if they dredged them up from the bottom of the ocean – from Atlantis!” Walking into the Lohin Geduld Gallery I had, as promised, the tingling sensation I was entering another realm. I also couldn’t get a line from T.S. Eliot out of my head – “And the dry stone no sound of water” – but I knew that wasn’t quite right. For as I made my way through the gallery, the melancholic and quietly haunting heads and faces kept suggesting, as my friend was the first to point out, “the deep sea swell.” Carved over the past thirty years from fieldstones gathered by the artist from his property in the Umbrian countryside, the sculpted heads that constitute the majority of the show highlight Nicolas Carone’s lifelong engagement with both the classical past and the twentieth century avant-garde.
On first glance, Greco-Roman (as well as Egyptian and Etruscan) antiquity permeates the show. A few of the heads could have ridden into the gallery on the crest of a wave, while others appear to have been scavenged from Delos or Autun. But more time spent with the carvings, all of which are untitled and undated, reveals how much more bizarre and modern many of them are. A large head at thigh level near the entrance of the gallery looks like it has been carved into the tumorous growth of a tree. Another head in the front room, carved in a beautiful, plastery white rock, is topped by a large bulb of stone that resembles an archaic grotesque, or a patch of coral, or some ungainly bunch of broccoli. Others bear the anguished air of Giacometti’s figures and Michelangelo’s slaves, their faces and forms barely emerging from oblivion.
Although the artist’s classical training -- he began his formal education at the Leonardo da Vinci School of Art at the age of eleven -- and his long immersion in the rich artistic traditions of Italy clearly inform the work, what is perhaps less apparent is the influence of Surrealism, with its emphasis on the unconscious mind as source for artistic creation and spiritual regeneration. An acquaintance of Duchamp and a close friend of both Roberto Matta and Jackson Pollock, Carone has spoken of the importance of automatism to his working process. He cannot begin a painting or drawing, he has remarked, with a preconceived idea of where it will go, and he cannot, as is often the case, start with the figure and work toward abstraction. There must be something there to begin with – some mark on the canvas, some presence – a line or lines that then suggest further lines, shapes, and forms.
Just as in one of the artist’s drawings, where a figure develops from a whirling abstraction that grew from a stray mark on the picture plane, the carvings that constitute the current show at Lohin Geduld emerge from beneath the raw, unwieldy surface of the stones, which are themselves gleaned from beneath the dirt of the Umbrian countryside. Carone collecting stones from the fields around his Italian studio recalls the Surrealists sifting through the bric-a-brac of Paris flea markets in search of the materials for their fetishes and assemblages. As the violently erotic constructions of the Surrealists suggest unharnessed powers and energies, so Carone’s carvings suggest the brute, tidal force of nature within man.
Nicolas Carone, untitled and undated drawing
sanguine on paper, 10-1/2 x 8-3/4 inches
In the rear office is a small survey of Carone’s drawings. Most are churning figure studies that could either be depicting orgies or mass slaughter. Or both. But a refined, quieter touch is also present in Carone’s works on paper. There is a beautifully rendered sepia chalk study of a head in profile and a pencil drawing of a lush nude curled in repose. Carone’s wax sculptures, also on view, extend the range of his delicate touch and suggest the subtly sensuous sculptures of Degas. But then again that touch – that tone – resonates throughout the whole show. In an interview Carone speaks of the importance of light in his sculptural process. “Sculpture,” he says, “is working with light and not so much working in three dimensions. The form is just a medium for you to hold light.” In the rear room of the gallery, attached at eye level to the east wall, there is a face carved into a shard of stone that, slightly turned, radiates the calm of an angel.
Jonathan Boyd lives and writes in New York City
