The Brooklyn Rail

How not to love these geometric steel simplicities that get right to the nature of things, and the nature of nature? In the wind, they move, and in fact his entire way of seeing and being and constructing is about movement, as Rickey says. I have been thinking about how the noun “motion” feels different from “movement,” the former being so generic and nominal, and frequent in industry, whereas the noun movement, used in so many meanings, feels so present, especially in this exhibition. Even present to the touch. That, in the Kasmin Gallery, inside, the wall reliefs as wonderful works aren’t actually in what we think of as “nature,” we still have—even on a screen—the feeling of the thing. I am not saying “things” because, strangely perhaps, these seem other than things. And radically more present than “objects” termed like that. The sway of them, inside or out, gets directly to our senses.

Funny (in the good sense of that really good word) the haunting “Gloomy Sunday” to which I was listening while writing this review was providing a perfect place for or situation of the George Rickey shapes: something about geometric obsession, the very strictness, gets directly to our spectator’s whateverness, since I need a term I can’t grasp. Ah. that ungraspableness is part of the point. Even though there is no natural wind to move these creations, it feels there. I believe in these moving shapes. And want to move with them.

As the gallery’s indication puts it, we see here Mark Yang’s “mash-up of body parts and limbs”—what a perfect way to initiate a few words about this quite amazing artist totally unknown to me, and, thank goodness, here in a totally available presence. How in the world can that be? Is it about recognition: here is a toe, a leg, a thigh? Or the absolute beauty of it all, these colors from which none of the depth seems absent. Purples, greens, deep all of the shades that call forth our instant response: oh, I see where the works are going, into the non-surface. I feel these limbs plunging down, and somehow I feel centered in the work.

Because my “field” (imagine having a field! John Berger in his flexible terms would be delighted!) is more or less Comparative Literature and the Visual Arts, which sounds far more glorious than it should, I am instantly seized by a possible sense of also the musical undertones and the poetic overtones of the whole kit and caboodle, if that is an available term. If not, let me beg your pardon for my Scottish vocabulary and simply urge you to get to the gallery.

Even lacking the wind for movement, the congruence of these wizards salutes the presence of deepscape (I’d like to invoke, as I often do, the poet and priest and occasional artist Gerard Manley Hopkins for his vocabulary of inscape to summon our feelings about these superb artists in their so different approaches: moving and plunging in, and the sense of losing nothing, in whatever movement, vertical and sideways, bodily and mentally, lateral and sweeping through and along. These are both artists of the movement of feeling inside and out, natural and imaginative.