The Brooklyn Rail

The Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore can be characterized by its double façades: the image of a classical temple rendered in bright white Istrian limestone superimposed onto the Venetian red brick structure of a Christian church. It forms an improbably precise setting for a Biennale-concurrent presentation of works by the sculptor Barry X Ball. As soon as the church becomes visible on the horizon, Ball’s audience is thinking about the artist’s central themes of materiality and time.

Though none of Ball’s sculptures—including the completely original portrait Pope Saint John Paul II (2012–24), that inspired Director Carmelo A. Grasso’s coordination of this show with curator-critic Bob Nickas—are exact replicas of their sources, the artist has been criticized for his technology-aided “reproduction” of masterworks. Yet it is precisely the technology he employs in early sculptural stages that enables him to reveal these figures in materials too fragile and layered in their mineral composition to be initially shaped by human hands. In their expressive color variances, they more accurately allude to the reality of recovered classical nudes from which the Renaissance greats drew their inspiration: not the pristine white marble of retrospective myth-making, but an array of vibrant paint applications and gemstone inlays.

In a gallery-like hallway that introduces the show, a selection of pieces from the “Medardo Rosso Project” implicitly reference the older artist’s use of lost-wax casting as well as his extant wax works. While Ball’s sculptures are based on detailed virtual models generated from Rossos built up in additive layers, his raw materials are subtractively carved and finished so as to mimic the milky, bloomed appearance of wax itself. Here the stone has been coaxed into forgetting its own hardness. Precision machinery produces the atmospheric indeterminacy of Rosso’s originals.

It is hardly novel that Ball’s process involves human and robot assistants: Auguste Rodin hired marble carvers and Henry Moore outsourced his bronze casting. The artist’s choices constitute his signature. His preservation of CNC milling lines provokes these authorship discussions while evoking the marks of Michelangelo’s hand left visible in the unfinished Pietà Rondanini (1552–53), which Ball transposes into his Iranian onyx Pietà (2011–22). This particular material has to be shipped to Italy before it can be shipped to the United States; the economic and political conditions of our time are inlaid.

The neighboring sacristy holds a series of Ball’s Buddhas in a cruciform composition. To drive the ecumenical dialogue home, Buddha (2018–25) is a hybrid figure in blended golden honeycomb calcite, “wounded” Mexican onyx, and French Rouge de Roi marble; Ball’s technologies blur the stones into one another. Small cavities from the Mexican onyx are seamlessly embedded into the pink Iranian onyx lotus throne, echoing Buddhist concepts of the lotus as a nested seat/symbol of enlightenment and the environment as an extension of the self. These sculptures are not facile offerings. Across all of his work, Ball draws from the legacy of gongshi (scholars’ rocks), which embody both the microcosmic essence and the transportive, meditative properties of natural objects and liturgical texts alike.

When asked to contribute a manuscript to the institution’s permanent collection, Ball transformed the Morgan Library’s Lindau Gospels into a semi-transparent mechanical reproduction that rests on Girolamo Campagna’s high altar between two monumental Tintoretto murals that—despite the teachings of Walter Benjamin—seem to glow with a similar internal light. In conversation and in stone, Ball expresses that the primary fascination with this tome lies not in its interior illuminations, but in the famous jeweled bindings that position the book as an object. The artist himself operates as a critic, translator, or art historian; by preserving landmark works in specific forms, he identifies points of significance.

My favorite pieces are the vertiginous Portrait Ensemble (2015–24) and Enthroned Pope, Reflected (2013–24). The latter features a recursive quadruple reflection: the upper stone forms towers like an echo of the lower, with both doubled in the circular metal platform at their center. Cast against the background image of the Basilica’s vaulted ceiling, the sculpture appears in its entirety in its optically mirrored base. As above, so below.

Ball compares this pair to obelisks. In ancient Egypt, these Aswan red granite monuments crowned with electrum communicated the premise of eternal life. In fifteenth-century Rome, Renaissance popes topped them with crosses, visually linking Catholicism to the region’s classical history of power. Portrait Ensemble and Enthroned Pope, Reflected share their gold-plated steel and aluminum scaffolding with the twin Mirrored Buddha Herms (2018–23). These frameworks suggest retrograde lunar landers or the ubiquitous construction cranes that frame the ornate Venice skyline. 

This show seems remarkably site-specific because Ball operates in Venetian textures: new and old, alternately smoothed and worn surfaces that collectively demonstrate “the shape of time.” As a Benedictine church, San Giorgio Maggiore is independent from the larger Catholic establishment and its associated funding. Like the surrounding architecture of its environment, it requires constant renovations. The conceptual project of the Basilica and the Biennale alike reveals the structural investment behind the conservation and maintenance of beauty: in the natural world, in history, and certainly in art.