The Brooklyn Rail

Craig Starr’s Joel Shapiro: Gouaches and Reliefs 1978–83 includes seven wooden reliefs, all but one smaller than a foot in height or width, and two include a congregation of unevenly proportioned aggregates. In untitled (ca. 1978–80), for instance, the edges of a chocolate and sandy-buff rectangular prism jut off an adjacent emerald box’s face. Each constituent cuboid is painted in a uniform single coat of oil, casein, or gouache. Other sculptures are evenly bedaubed in uniform colors, giving them the dimensional imprint of self-sufficient forms. Their coats are either primary colors, like cardinal red and azure blue, or near-relatives, such as vermillion and aquamarine. Throughout, Shapiro applies paint in thin, laminate strokes that do not hide the wood’s materiality, revealing the curve of knots and rivulets of grain beneath the paint.

In the years before he created this series, Shapiro had made use of the formal terms of mid-1960s Minimalism while deviating from the hostility to visual reference characteristic of artists like Robert Morris and Donald Judd, who excluded purpose-built designs and familiar forms from their constructions. By contrast, in his 1975 cast iron Untitled (House), Shapiro placed a roof-like trilateral sculpture atop one of Morris’s blocks; the result was what Kirk Varnedoe called a “Monopoly house.” During this period, Shapiro constructed other such “little houses” that served as structural models evoking notions of domesticity, shelter, and storage. Like their antecedents, Shapiro’s 1978–83 suite of reliefs enjoy diminutive corporeal scale, but they function neither metaphorically nor as decoys or models. The 1978–83 works are much closer to Minimalist orthodoxy than Shapiro’s earlier appropriations, despite the fact that they sport neither clean edges nor geometric regularity.

During the 1978–83 period, Shapiro also executed a related series of gouache-on-paper shapes—colorful triangular, ovular, or rectangular pieces flatly layered. These accompany and break up the array of sculptures on view at Craig Starr. Although they first give the impression of preparatory models for the wooden constructions, there is no explicit relationship between the paintings and sculptures. What unifies the two bodies of work is how they both eschew referential anchors to the forms of the built or observed world. Relatedly, Shapiro’s irregular forms also do not correlate with the evenly layered polygons-cum-polyhedrons forms familiar to architecture and geometry. In turn, these reliefs also abjure the modeled world.

In a 2007 interview with Richard Shiff, Shapiro underscores his interest in “what the form could be, without getting involved with reference to something else.” He goes on to emphasize that he sought to avoid “referential imagery that seemed to have any meaning to me.” Taking into account his reliefs, it seems that this “something else” should be understood in the broadest possible sense. Although Shapiro was referring to his earlier clay works, like One Hand Forming (1971), such smoothed-lozenge, ovoid masses ultimately remained affixed to the planar forms of geometry. Only in his later reliefs would Shapiro truly expunge the possibility of such subtending “referential imagery” or empirical concepts.

Shapiro’s concern with detaching the form of an object from any kind of recognizable concept is evinced by exemplary works like the eggshell blue, irregular semicircle untitled (1979) and the puce-brown skewed pincer untitled (1979/2003). Both invent unfamiliar shapes at odds with any prospect of recognizability. Shapiro’s forms refuse cognitive contact with the operative concepts that we, in our everyday perceiving, attach to objects of representation. Where a viewer tries to reign in Shapiro’s images—likening untitled’s (1983) flaxen-yellow mound pressed atop a twisted, thick chestnut wand to a spoon or shovel holding a wedge of butter, perhaps—it quickly becomes clear that they are taking unwarranted optical and conceptual liberties.

In his Critique of Judgement, Immanuel Kant argues that aesthetic pleasure stems from the experience of apprehending the form of an object without relating it to a concept of determinate cognition. Shapiro has created such “free” forms, which deny any firm agreement between the perceiving mind and the shape of an object, prompting what Kant describes as the “free play” of the imagination with the understanding. Shapiro forges forms that remain so foreign and inconceivable that we must apprehend them primarily as pure, purposeless material. This is accentuated by Shapiro’s choice to not varnish away the traces of wood, and instead allow the capillaries and knots of his material to fully surface. As a result, the reliefs are imbued with the sense that they are not colored forms but that the color belongs to the form as such. Bill Berkson described Shapiro's early-to-mid 1970s iron and bronze “shapes” as “caught in the in-between zone of nameable things.” In his 1978–83 wooden reliefs, there is no longer the presence of such an “in-between zone.” Conceptually unmoored from the possibility of purpose or worldly reference, these forms are fully unnamable.