Bronzes and Drawings

Paul Harris: Bronzes and Drawings

When:  Tues., June 10 – Sun., August 17, 2008
Where:  Jacquelin Pilar Contemporary Gallery
Conversation with the Artist: Fri., June 13, 4:15 pm

It was an achingly delicate song, not so much music as air, silence outlined by a few notes.
                                                     --- Kathryn Chekovich

Paul Harris is a sculptor of vision – he is able to transform his life experience into provocative works of art arising from a sense of concentrated yearning. His language is that of form born of the unconscious reservoir of personal experience but it is a language that shares with music the magical moment of silence. In his writing, Harris says, “…forms must unite in a sculpture which has something to say. Sculpture is a form of mime; it must speak without words. Sculpture must engage, arouse, disturb, and irritate some tiny particle within us that nothing else touches. An intellectual response is grey and cold and unacceptable. But when was the last time a sculpture caused us to weep as we might in a theater? A collection of beautiful forms is not enough. Forms must cry out about our loneliness, our desperations, our delights. Sculpture must be slow and fast, moody and spirited. Sculpture must speak and be mute.”

There is a sense of gravity born of a personal discipline requiring that same pureness of simplicity found in the Shaker’s utilitarian expression – or the same kind of silence found in Quaker worship that pervades Harris’ timeless world. There is a balance of geometric abstraction and natural anatomy as well as an element of elapsed time in the rounded figures and intersecting angular forms that activates the overall composition of many of his works. It is work that has absorbed the purified abstractions of Constantin Brancusi and the formal language of Jacques Lipchitz. In all of Harris’ work there is a profound sense of care and precision – his eye as an artist, his irony as a survivor, his compassion as a humanist and his wit born of brillance, result in a comprehensive body of work. There is an unusual power and quiet beauty that threads throughout every series created over the last sixty years.

This exhibition is one of both drawing and sculpture – it is an expression of work created over the past five years, during a time when illness required a return to Harris’ ongoing fascination with crayons as the medium for drawing. In a wonderful short essay by Morris Yarowsky, the writer reports “that which binds drawing and sculpture for Harris is his extraordinary delight in the idea of composing in the visual arts as he imagines it happens in music. For him the finest moment – the apex of all creative activity – is that second when the artist begins to compose. He is enthralled by the notion that sounds are placed one after another in a vast white silence. Equally enchanting is the speculation that a white rectangle awaits the arrival of patches of color one after the other.” Thinking in musical terms, Harris speaks of his crayons as if they were a piano keyboard – “a drawing may be in the key of blue or brown, or orange.” Eleven crayon drawings are a major part of this exhibition, bringing an intensity of hue and a two dimensional approach where the “drawings color moves through an expansive range of hues covering many ‘octaves’ in modes descriptive and abstract, evocative and silent, harmonious and dissonant. Here one finds affinities with Schoenberg and Stravinsky whose explorations of dissonance are central milestones in the development of twentieth century music. Color harmonies are a part of these drawings but they occur alongside a maelstrom of color dissonance.”

There are eight sculptures of dark patina and unusual form that bring the weight of volume as well as a deeply resolved sense of contemporary man’s place in history. The two-part sculpture, Soldiers, brings all war into meaning just as the enigmatic sculpture wearing the stovepipe hat, The Leveler, looks out upon the vast battlefield of modern life. Or could the stovepipe hat refer to the current American administration’s predilection for determining government policy based on faulty intelligence? These works are balanced by the gentle whimsical Woman with Puffed Sleeves, who seems to reflect an earlier time of simple grace while the work, The Music Stopped, is one of existential sadness. Previously exhibited in the Paul Harris exhibition of 1999/2000, the bronze relief of 1989 entitled Early One Morning, where an entwined couple lying on the upper step has now been replaced by the 2003 wall relief, Night House. In this wall sculpture the two lovers have either not yet come to their place of assignation or have left together on separate paths following their early morning tryst. This newer work repeats the same motif of the framed doorway with its steps, now time is poised as a place of stillness, a place of imaginative mystery. The waiting doorway steps are vacant, shrouded in an undertone of dark anticipation much like the doorways of Venice. Here Harris has again followed his own unique sense of form with all the complexity and angst of modern man - his is a timeless and silent language of unspoken eloquence.

Paul Harris studied with Johannes Molzahn at the New School for Social Research, New York City and with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His work has been exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum and in various museums in Europe and South America. He was a Fulbright professor in Chile, a MacDowell Colony resident, a Guggenheim recipient and a visiting artist at the Rinehardt School of Sculpture, Baltimore. Harris has taught at New York University, University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco Art Institute prior to becoming a faculty member at California College of Art in 1968, where he taught until 1992. He lives and works in Bolinas, California.