David Newman
Gallery Director
Forum Gallery
Brookhaven College School of the Arts

The problem of tectonic and a-tectonic has first a special application to sculpture as a problem of placing or, to put it otherwise, as a problem of the relation to architecture.

Heinrich Wolffin1

Rick Maxwell’s new sculpture and drawings combine an engagement with density and mass with ethereal, almost ephemeral, line.  Referencing organic, natural entities without specifically representing their referents, the words are abstract, expressively gestural deployments of shape, volume, and line in space.  As such, both the sculpture and the drawings are in the end reflexive and ultimately engage the means of their making, both with respects to their material cause and the processes of their facture.

Maxwell’s sculpture is structured around a central, vertical axis, most often inflected from plumb verticality.  Still, verticality qua an implied plumb line is sensed in response to the works; one regards the deviation from the plumbness as a gestural inflection, and responds  to its expressivity.  The response is conditioned and informed by one’s lived experience of the embodiedness of one’s self, and of other selves.  To so respond to the work is to suppose that a vestigial figurative aspect obtains for closed three-dimensional form as such, even with the work has no reference to the figure and in no ostensible respect is a representation of the figure.

Some sense of the role of gestural variation in similar forms in found in Three Really Excited Ladies.  The three components share a similar structure of dense block elevated from the floor on turned wooden finials (which read immediately and inevitably as shoes with high heels), with elongated necks arching upward and off-plumb, swelling at the terminal end to suggest a head.  Beyond the obvious variation of finish of the parts of each component of the work, and variation in scale, there is subtle variation in the gesture of each of the component pieces.