The problem of tectonic and a-tectonic has first a special application to sculpture as a problem of placing or, to put it otherwise, as a problem of the relation to architecture.
Heinrich Wölfflin 1
Rick Maxwell's new sculpture and drawings combine an engagement with density and mass with ethereal, almost ephemeral, line. Referencing organic, natural entities without specifically representing their referents, the works are abstract, expressively gestural deployments of shape, volume, and line in space. As such, both the sculpture and the drawings are in the end reflexive and ultimately engage the means of their making, both with respect to their material cause and the processes of their facture.
Maxwell's sculpture is structured around a central, vertical axis, most often inflected from plumb verticality. Still, verticality qua an implied plumb line is sensed in response to the works; one regards the deviation from plumbness as a gestural inflection, and responds to its expressivity. That response is conditioned and informed by one's lived experience of the embodiedness of one's self, and of other selves. To so respond to the work is to suppose that a vestigial figurative aspect obtains for closed three-dimensional form as such, even when the work has no reference to the figure and in no ostensible respect is a representation of the figure.
Some sense of the role of gestural variation in similar forms in found in Three Really Excited Ladies. The three components share a similar structure of dense block elevated from the floor on turned wooden finials (which read immediately and inevitably as shoes with high heels), with elongated necks arching upward and off-plumb, swelling at the terminal end to suggest a head. Beyond the obvious variation of finish of the parts of each component of the work, and variation in scale, there is subtle variation in the gesture of each of component pieces.
Both Carpel Tunnel and Bad Brush consist is a dense roughly sawn wooden lower section surmounted with thin crepe myrtle stems with intact bark, closely set together and bundled by large wooden screws joining tapped sections of wood. In Carpel Tunnel the crepe myrtle stems continue the plumb verticality of the lower wooded element; in Bad Brush the crepe myrtle stems are similarly constrained, but nevertheless are splayed like the bristles of a brush gone bad. The difference of sustained, compacted verticality and of a verticality splaying beyond constraint is subtle, but substantial, for the felt constraint is not merely that of the constraining elements within the works, but ultimately of gravity as a natural force.
The suspended work White Spine / Black Spine depends on gravity for the insistent verticality of the orientation of the axis of the two components. Around and extending from these axis, horizontal elements extend, less at the top, more at the bottom, blades of ceiling fans multiplying and bending. Between the two components the negative volume of each component is implied as an inverted volume.
In contrast to White Spine / Black Spine, Black Bone, Above the Thunder, and Jesse's Steps are gestural lines bending as a sprout bends under the effect of phototropism. Black Bone, Above the Thunder, and in a somewhat more limited and vestigial manner Jessie's Steps, consolidate the segmentation of White Spine / Black Spine to the central axis itself.
In marking a position in space, Maxwell's sculpture inevitably responds to and references the architectural space of the gallery, as framed by white walls demarking the limits of a void against which the gesture of the work can be gauged, and as a plane on which the trace of the sculpture qua shadow is projected. 2
Maxwell's drawings are materially traces of the sculpture, being drawn with charcoal made from the wood scraps produced in carving. More saliently, the drawings continue the gestural abstraction of the sculpture in another area of practice, responding to the field of the sheet as the sculpture references the architectural space in its installation. The marks are mainly oriented parallel to the plane of the paper, with a limited suggestion of depth developed primarily through massing of value and variation in line weight and speed of the mark. The delicacy of mark, and confidence of touch and écriture parallel the strength of facture of the sculpture, each the alterity of the other medium.
Rick Maxwell is Professor of Art at Brookhaven College School of the Arts. Maxwell received the Bachelor of Arts from the University of Dallas and the Master of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University.