Richard Rezac’s 12 new abstract wood and metal sculptures at Feigen are easy to miss at first. Often small, sometimes mounted in corners or perched high on a wall, they look a bit like manufactured objects whose original function is now obscure. Rezac is not surprised by this comparison. “In undergraduate art school I fixed on the value of simplicity,” he says and compares his work to hand tools. “The use of materials in tools is usually close to perfect–they have a rationale and simplicity. I would like my works to have a rightness that seems indisputable.”
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Rezac begins with drawings, which only sometimes progress to models and then to actual sculptures. “I think I just respond to what’s in front of me and then make a change or confirm what’s there. I try to read what the characteristics of the form are, what it needs to be–heavy or light, what color, what method of construction it needs to have.”
The earliest memory Rezac has of making art was an assignment he had in elementary school to draw the interior of a house–and how hard he concentrated on the wooden floorboards and grain. He knew little about art until he went away to college in Oregon. “My idea of good art was Andrew Wyeth. A sculp-ture teacher asked me why; I told him he could draw the very best, and he kept asking why that was significant.” Soon Rezac discovered the German expressionists and Matisse, which led to the abstractions of Mondrian and Brancusi and to minimalists like Richard Serra and Donald Judd. He became concerned with whether “a line could either be a forward extension from edge to edge of the paper or a demarcation within the rectangle.” Eventually his drawings led to paper cutouts, which became designs for sculptures.
–Fred Camper
