The Brooklyn Rail

In Lieu Non Lieu (2025), the only two-dimensional work in Paul Wallach’s current exhibition at Fergus McCaffrey, the artist applies black pencil to the gallery wall, spelling out the work’s title in block letters, word stacked upon word. The phrase “lieu non lieu” (place no place) references anthropologist Marc Augé’s distinction between spaces in which we feel a connection to the people around us and those in which we are anonymous, lonely; it speaks to the polarity of permanence and transiency, being and non-being. Also the title of Wallach’s exhibition, Lieu Non Lieu presents a cohesive array of works that question the certainty of physical form and self-recognition across more than thirty years of artmaking.

Stretching upward from the gallery floor in a precarious tower of wooden bars and blocks held together by gauze, glue, and gravity, the ten-foot high sculpture WHERE WHAT WAS (2013) looks as if it could, at any moment, fall with a crash. Indeed, the gallery receptionist asks me not to step too close, explaining that the work is composed of three separate units, carefully placed one on top of the other with just one askew leg at the bottom supporting it all. The many lines and angles that seemed to form and reform as I circled the structure from a safe distance entranced me. From one viewpoint, the upper limbs of the piece came together in the form of a five-pointed star; at another, they took the shape of a loose St. Brigid’s Cross. Underneath, the thin planks that make up the work’s foundation lean and tilt at impossible angles. Honest and playful, the sculpture alludes to the previous century’s Constructivist movement—think Tatlin’s Tower—while asserting its own tenuous existence in the present moment.

Erster Akt (2015) features four white plaster arms curving upward from a central point on the gallery floor. Each is topped by a black steel block fixed with steel wires that rise to meet at a point in the ceiling. The sculpture’s apparent gracefulness when viewed from across the gallery diminishes on close inspection of its components: the heavy steel blocks, bound by twists of thick wire, not only support the weight of the arched plaster rods, but also prevent them from cracking and falling. Holding them suspended in space and time, the wires inhibit any sort of progression by the blocks from their present state.

A collection of smaller wall-mounted works compliment Wallach’s large-scale structures. Truth That (2019), a patch of white painted canvas stretched over a small square of wood, is affixed with three ribbons of black cloth that intersect at angles, creating the illusion of a corner or a cube. Projecting about four inches from the wall, this optical game of shifting depth and surface is anchored by a gnarly tree root cast in lead that literally weighs down Wallach’s minimal abstraction. In Apatride (2021), a piece of gauze adhered to a board is coated in pearl gray paint. A sliver of wood extends past the lower edge of the piece, a small but determined disruptor of the picture plane. The structure is fixed to the wall by three blocks of wood, also daubed gray. The title translates from French to mean “stateless,” a person without a country, but can also signify non-existence, a state of being that might best be described as a gray zone.

Apartide, or statelessness, aligns with Augé’s categories of places he considers non-lieu: airports, highways, shopping malls—locales where we do not linger but travel through in a way that interrupts a consistent sense of being. Wallach deftly evokes the experience of alienation and disconnection in two floor-mounted sculptures, non lieu (2022) and Non Lieu (2024). In the former, a small, forward-tilting chair made from planks of wood is brushed with a thin coating of plaster. Wallach ties a pane of mirrored glass to the chair’s back with string, as if the mirror, or whatever image it holds, is seated in it. The expectation, as I approach the object, is that I will see myself, or at least my shoes, in the mirror’s reflection, but the chair’s forward lean is so acute that no matter how close I get, I only see the floor. It’s as if I’m not there, as if I’ve been unseated and erased. The work updates Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto’s “Mirror Paintings” of the 1960s, in which viewers saw themselves as elements within the work of art. Wallach’s viewers do not see themselves, and, according to his mirror, do not exist at all. Non Lieu, a larger iteration of this work, multiplies the uncanny sensation by employing ten identical wooden chairs held together by a length of mirror. The same forward tilt of the chair prevents any reflection of the observer or even of the chairs themselves. Only the gray cement floor of the gallery is visible in the mirror’s surface, leaving me to contemplate my statelessness in the non-space that surrounds me.