The Brooklyn Rail

Aaron Curry is a mid-career sculptor working with figures made of light wood, often on chest-high pedestals of the same material, usually embellished with colored pencil and some paint. The figures, divided into two small rooms in the gallery, start out at first like examples of 20th-century modernism, but there is another current: often the faces and bodies of the figures look a bit eccentric, as if their inspiration came from cartoons. Together they feel like a crowd of 21st-century mannequins, a group of motionless but vivid representations of puppets, whose solid silence is jazzed up by the eccentricity of their demeanor as well their childlike, theatrical, rounded body-forms. The mannequins echo popular and higher culture. This means this body of work, like so much work produced today, bridges the old and the new. When such a merger takes place, not only do we look ahead to an unknown future, we consider the past a counterweight holding later times steady.

The pop element in Curry’s work reminds us that, for several generations now, populism has been dominant in art. This means that historical understating is no longer an active part of our esthetic; instead, accessibility is considered more important than intellectual suggestion, leading to a frame of mind at a good distance from things difficult to understand. The puppets are charming, but they lack the command resulting from a demanding mind. The consideration of time may enter into the work; the group’s deliberate stillness arrives as the stoppage of time, making it nearly impossible to invest the sculptures with a vision that transforms the passage of minutes into something palpable and unreal.

In the long run, what matters most is the effectiveness of the work. Curry’s work revolves around caricature—the mild fun of idiosyncrasy. But there is something deeper, too: The presence of the body as a reminder of limited life.