Sculpture Magazine

Karlis Rekevics’s generously scaled, weirdly architectural cast plaster constructions are some of the most robust, aggressive, materially expressive sculptures around. They are also among the most evocative and elusive. For all their size, their evident mass and weight, and their rough material palette, Rekevics’s haunting structures refuse to rely solely on the unignorable fact of their considerable presence or to yield to a single reading. Somehow, they conjure up a wealth of often contradictory but enriching associations. With their idiosyncratic metal superstructures and glowing incandescent bulbs, they suggest the unlovelier parts of the urban environment—expediently built, unconsidered, usually peripheral, often decaying elements of the city—that we habitually encounter but almost never register. Yet these references are simply Rekevics’s starting point. His real subject is the way memory transforms perception. His sculptures are rooted in real experience, but it is experience tempered by recollection, changed, fragmented, conflated, and reordered, before being translated into an intensely physical metaphorical language. The architectural allusions of Rekevics’s work notwithstanding, he plays fast and loose with rational spatial and structural relationships, altering scale and defeating logical expectations. His component forms are never cast from pre-existing objects; he constructs his own versions of his chosen glimpses of the urban landscape, essentially in reverse, as molds, their proportions and character subtly altered.

Rekevics announced himself as someone to watch in 2002, staking out an individual formal and intellectual terrain with installations at a Triangle Arts Association residency in DUMBO and in the group show “Building Structures,” at P.S.1. Both installations were equivalents for remembered urban phenomena. The enormous DUMBO installation included a fragile cage of narrow cast plaster members, studded with light bulbs, that tenuously suggested the giant billboards that line the approaches to the Midtown Tunnel; beside it, a vast, curving elevated plane seemed to pull the ramps of the Brooklyn Bridge, visible outside, into the sculpture, making us question the distinction between object and place, while the supporting structures and other components seemed momentarily to dissolve the differences between interior and exterior. At P.S.1, Rekevics explored related territory, deploying a deceptively casual stack of plaster slabs, some swollen, notched vertical walls, and a couple of light bulbs. These geometric, matte white components retreated into a corner, away from the elegantly arched windows of the former classroom, but they also forced us to consider their relationship to the gritty cityscape outside those windows, insisting that we test Rekevics’s inventions against our recollections of what we had seen, without really paying attention, on our way through not-quite-gentrified Long Island City, from the subway to P.S.1.

What was striking about both installations was not only their physicality—
both were notably greedy in their demands for space—but also their intimacy and their sense of touch: both drew us close to their fragile surfaces, subtly marked by the incidents of the mold. These qualities may seem at odds with the sculptures’ industrial overtones and their systematic construction methods, but Rekevics is a passionate maker, deeply involved in physical processes and convinced that the history of a sculpture’s making and the character of its materials are inseparable from its expressiveness. “I want my hands all over what I do,” he said at a recent panel discussion, when a colleague spoke of aspiring to the anonymous surfaces and glossy finish of what he called “high production values.”

Rekevics developed his building skills working beside an architect father who preferred an empirical, hands-on approach to the normal construction methods routinely employed in his successful practice, and more or less reconstructed the family home himself, exploding a fairly conventional house into a multi-level prism that transformed perceptions of space. Later, Rekevics supported himself by constructing stage sets, becoming adept at solving difficult problems of creating illusions with short-lived, unreal structures. “At a certain point,” he says, “I realized I could apply what I knew about building temporary structures to making my sculpture.” This understanding of the uses of the ephemeral often informs Rekevics’s sculptures. His works frequently diagram compressed time, existing only for the length of an exhibition and doomed to be shattered.

Rekevics honed his perceptual skills at the New York Studio School, whose program concentrates on how seeing can be reconstituted as mark-making or form-building. This disciplined training is evident in Rekevics’s virtuoso drawings, which range from economical notes to monumentally scaled, finished works. Some are about the energetic movement of the hand. Others, made with stencils, are as simplified and ample as his sculptures. Rekevics says that making the stencil drawings feels like the same process as making his sculpture. “Constructing” a shape in terms of its contour and then spraying pigment inside that contour becomes a two-dimensional version of conceiving a form in reverse, building a mold, and filling it with liquid plaster.

Rekevics’s drawings make his urban themes explicit: an unprepossessing corner near his Brooklyn studio, roadside signs glimpsed driving cross-country in his vintage pickup, the decaying struts and beams of an age-raddled overpass, the hastily built hoardings of a construction site. The drawings are so immediate and sharply observed that it’s surprising to learn that they are done from memory. The acute roadside notations, for example, were done each night, after the day’s driving stint, as a kind of visual diary. “They’re things I liked or that puzzled me or that I thought were funny,” Rekevics explains. Done en route to a residency in a remote part of western Canada, the drawings became the basis of the installation he built there, both a starting point and a declaration of the artist’s identity, as a record of how he had arrived so far from his home base.

The plaster and wood piece that grew out of those drawings began as a relatively contained construction of vertical columns, stacked slabs, and long horizontals, but it soon started moving off the roofed, concrete sculpture pad into the surrounding woods. Among close-packed evergreens, in shifting light, the white plaster structure lost its urban resonance and became a classical temple—“Adam’s hut in Paradise,” one viewer said. Disconcerted by these Arcadian overtones, Rekevics built a lamppost and added a wash of cold bluish light to subvert the pastoral, neo-classical associations. The result was to wrench the piece unequivocally into the present, secularize it, and make it more mysterious.

Two years later, confronted with one of the tunnel-like basement galleries at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, Rekevics, far from resisting the quirky specifics of his environment, embraced them whole-heartedly and made the constraints of the space a positive element. His response was a meditation on layering, compression, and penetration. By co-opting the walls of the narrow space into his sculpture and constructing visually permeable barriers—low “railings,” pierced “screens,” and punctuating columns—Rekevics forced us to look through and deeply into the sculpture. Light once again was an important component, modulating color, pulling us towards an inaccessible interior, and turning the inhospitable proportions into part of the meaning of the work. Rekevics’s interventions made the space appear even longer, lower, and narrower than it was, provoking associations with the forced perspectives of Baroque architecture, in wholly vernacular, informal terms. A rather claustrophobic subterranean place became a paradoxically defined “non-space” whose dimensions seemed elastic, the way they are in dreams or unreliable memories.

Each of these projects—and several others along the way—was freshly conceived in relation to the space it occupied, but making them seemed to help Rekevics codify his visual vocabulary and deepen his meaning. His contribution to a two-person installation (with the Canadian multimedia artist, Clay Ellis) at the Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, early in 2006, was as alien to the idyllic New England college town as his roadside improvisation was to the Saskatchewan woods. At Dartmouth, a cascade of plaster beams, arcades, and sloping ramps once again evoked the anonymous structures of the neglected edges of the city. But just when we thought we recognized the prototypes of Rekevics’s trusses and beams, we became aware of their unexpected proportions, colors, and materials, and of surprising, even illogical spatial configurations—
responses, perhaps to the tapering volume of the site. The installation was at once a large-scale fragment of the cityscape and a (perhaps abandoned) interior. Pools of warm light from strategically placed bulbs tinted the white plaster and reinforced the ambiguity by simultaneously recalling street lighting and illuminated indoor space. Rekevics seemed to have dissected an immense, muscular portion of the urban environment, recombined its parts, shifted its scale, and blurred the separation between interior and exterior. Yet a (fluctuating) sense of monumentality remained, along with a persistent flavor of the original perception.

It was as if Rekevics had drawn a parallel between the accidental ambiguity and potential transience of things on the urban periphery with the deliberate multivalence and limited life of his metaphorical constructions. The delicate, elegant, matte pallor of the plaster surface was forced, by virtue of its otherness, to be an unlikely equivalent for rusted metal and crumbling masonry. The massive stillness of the piece notwithstanding, the passage of time itself appeared to have become one of his components. The plaster bore the memory of the molds that formed it, each irregularity bearing witness to the brute physicality of Rekevics’s process, yet at the same time, offering testimony to the effects of time, a notion intensified by the light bulbs, which suggested the transition from night to day; an unlit bulb—spent or not yet illuminated?—added to the puzzle.

Rekevics’s growing body of work makes it clear that while he may begin with familiar elements of our built surroundings, the relationship between his generating images and the metaphorical structures he builds is increasingly unstable. His 2006 multi-part installation, Veracity, Validity, Fabrication, Facts? (Trace) (2006) in the group exhibition “Trace” at the Whitney Altria space, at once paid homage to the most memorable specifics of the location and completely reconfigured them. He played off of some of the most dramatic elements visible through the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling windows: the façade of Grand Central and the Pershing Square overpass, where Park Avenue rises up to embrace the great Beaux-Arts terminal building. But we had to work hard to discover what had attracted his attention in the built environment, even after he had alerted you to the presence of the rivet-studded sides of girders, a protective canopy with strings of lights, and a supporting truss. His marvelously allusive installation was compelling quite independently of its layers of associations. Slabs of plaster and pools of light seemed almost equally significant as structural components. Low-lying slabs, arranged in a scalloped row, lifted themselves along one edge, like yoga adepts in a gravity-defining pose; the golden light from a row of naked bulbs, underneath, became the force thrusting the plaster planes upward.

The piece echoed one of Grand Central’s metal, light-rimmed entrance canopies, but Rekevics utterly changed our physical relationship to the source (along with its visual density, material qualities, and proportions), making us look down and into his inventive construction and insisting that we address its special properties. Returning outside, we considered the Grand Central canopy freshly, perhaps noticed it for the first time. Equally compelling was a skewed assembly of wedge-shaped, pierced “girders” and a horizontal slab, sliced to expose the metal reinforcements, like abrupt drawing strokes. Here the light source was hidden, so that the sculpture seemed to generate an inexplicable rosy glow that appeared as solid as the plaster elements. The pool of light not only colored the plaster but also cancelled out the shadows cast by the misaligned, loose-jointed “beams,” disembodying the massive structure, and making it even more uncanny and poetic. The third large and largest component—a row of slabs evocative of old-style riveted girders, studded with bosses and naked light bulbs, one deliberately turned off to suggest the passage of time—was the most logically constructed and the clearest in reference. Yet Rekevics subverted expectations by destabilizing our relation to the sculpture. We were stopped by the chest-high, interlocked, fragmented “girders,” and made to encounter the pale, dislocated structure not as a quotation from actuality, but as an abstract, unprecedented object that demanded that we measure ourselves against it to determine its irrational scale.

Rekevics’s recent installation at Lori Bookstein Gallery moved into slightly new territory. A group of arched forms clustered together, like a fractured arcade, extending a long, tipped section toward the viewer. The piece had a loose-jointed, animated quality, as if the configuration before us might change and its parts assume new relationships. Rekevics explored this possibility at the Wooster Arts Space in 2005, in a combination of enclosure and loosely defined precinct, constructed with sturdy cast plaster “blocks”; the modular components suggested that the piece could be remade in different ways, in other contexts. At Lori Bookstein, however, the varied parts were certainly not interchangeable, and the notion of improvisation was subverted by light-filled rectangular recesses that asserted the thickness and, by implication, the permanence of the plaster slabs. Scale, however, seemed provocatively unstable. Were we in the presence of a structure that echoes human proportions, like any other part of our built environment, or were we confronted by oversized fragments of something much larger? I kept thinking about the giddy flourishes of high Baroque monuments. Since Rekevics spent his early childhood in Rome, riding his tricycle around the Bernini fountains in Piazza Navona, it’s possible that early memories are coming to the surface.

Rekevics sees himself as a Modernist, and his work is devoid of Postmodernist cynicism. He is committed to abstraction but excludes nothing from his sculpture—conceptually or in terms of material, scale, or approach, allusions and complex associations. He says that his work is about the questions that arise in making it. Despite the assertive scale and declarative materiality, he says that he feels his sculptures are about “doubt, being puzzled, being unsure—a kind of conversation I have with myself when I’m making them.” It’s evidently a conversation about the possibilities of what sculpture can be, about the relationship of place and object, interior and exterior, past and present; it’s a conversation about how the passage of time may be acknowledged in sculptural terms, about the meaning of location and dislocation, about the nature of memory and its embodiment. The resonant structures Rekevics builds in response to his internal dialogue provide fresh answers to these absorbing questions.