at Sperone Westwater Gallery

L. Faux: CMYK 2005, silicone, pigment, hair, 152 x 122 x 25 cm

Arguably the most memorable exhibition opening the fall season, Evan Penny's "No One - In Particular" is distinctive for works that offer less an extreme realism than an alternative reality. Penny's bust sculptures appear lifelike despite their distorted presentations. Some are portraits, others, as the show's title suggests, are ciphers made up in Penny's imagination, but with particularities that make them seem as individuals. All are super scaled, but the strangest common deformation is that which compacts robust looking figures into a few inches of relief. In some works, Penny further warps the planes to force some eye-popping perspectives. Penny runs the risk of seeming gimmicky, but beyond the spectacle these sculptures are conceptually compelling.

Overtly distorted works such as Madrileño #1 (2005) could be misunderstood as "automatic" computer manifestations, since their images seem taken directly from skews and scalings made in Photoshop or 3ds Max . Because of this distortion, Penny's works fit our digital zeitgeist--the difficult to realize anamorphoses and planar distortions that have been understood for centuries are now push-button available and have entered the common visual lexicon. In 3D, the deformations are infinitely more complex because (as Mark B.N. Hansen points out) the depth hinders resolution of 2D distortions. The forced axonometric view in the male nude Aerial (2005) distinguishes our time and is derived from popular video games such as The Sims , eBoy graphics, or the video surveillance of ubiquitous wall-mounted cameras.

While Penny uses imaging software, most of the work involves hand-carving clay, rubber casting, and "painting" many pigmented silicone layers. Finishing touches include cast eyes, implanted hairs, and custom-made clothing. These hand-crafted works that evoke the photographic and digital are paradoxical but offer a fitting allegory for human perceptions and expectations informed by photographic optics and digital alterations. It is appropriate that Penny recently worked in the film industry making special effects props and prostheses that would look "correct" for the cinematic camera that has become a substitute for human vision.

Penny drives the photographic point home in L. Faux CMYK (2001-05), a spectacle in which the haptic succumbs to an optical phenomenon--the familiar misregistration of the four-color process. Making physical realizations of the blurred and multiply exposed image, Penny evokes Man Ray's tripled La Marquise Casati (1922) and Warhol's doubled silkscreens. In all of Penny's works, the references to painted photorealism can't be missed--the oversizing, exacting details, and the subjects' objectified, mug shot expressions are evocative of Chuck Close portraits and Howard Kanovitz cutouts.

The mind struggles with each Penny work to adjust to the distortions. Looking away results in a disturbing split-second phenomenon in which reality seems as skewed as the Penny works. The Renaissance's illusions followed Protagoras' dictum--man was the measure of all things--as perspectives, even extreme anamorphoses, were situated for the human viewer. By jolting our sense of "real" space "No One - In Particular" intensifies and illustrates a (mis)perception defining our visual age--that the machine perspective of photography, video, film and their digital cousins now have a primacy that we mistake as human

William V. Ganis

Even Penny: No One - In Particular is on view at Sperone Westwater
from September 9 - October 29, 2005.