Scott Richter
Elvis or Oedipus Series
Scott Richter's wall sculptures shown here are all images of the human body. Seven pieces are triangular in shape and relate to the male torso and four others are very large versions of the female.
He starts with the perfectly chiseled examples of classical figures and develops way past that to where these emulations are more primitive and more direct.
They're eerie and that's because they work on the magic level of totems and the figures of African deities. They seem to be remnants of a lost civilization who, through these pieces, wished to give static expression to the nobility of their race. We hear the winds of centuries gone whispering past them.
The male pieces are simple triangular shapes flushed out and tapered as if a chest and rib cage. Arms are cut off in all but two of the pieces and in those the arms hang down in tusk shapes from the broad shoulders. The pieces recall the cattle skulls of a wind-swept old west and add an element of a preserved frontier.
The four female sculptures are more involved. Three of them start with a nude torso at the top (arms and head severed off) but then evolve, or devolve, to a mermaid-like tail at the bottom. Or rather, a letter opener or perhaps, stinger, form. Another has arms that circle back into the hips and, with a flower pot-like neck, looks like a large ceramic combination teapot/letter opener. They recall Giacometti as the stark scale of the upper torso is smaller as the bottom gets elongated.
It's the treatment of his surfaces that add the "class" to these works. Over the armatures of wood, wire, foam and carpet he applies pigmented beeswax that gives them an elegant look of polished whale teeth or bone.
And he can paint. The colors, embedded in the surface of the beeswax, are a central part of the material and then he builds up the surface by painting over that. His use of the colored beeswax and paint is affecting and pretty though it's a rough application of thick splatters, patches and abstract shapes and patterns of rich colors. A great deal of movement is frozen into the solid dimensions of the objects with this integration of the worked colors merging both above and below the surface.
In a few of the "men" pieces, black paint, spread like taut fibers across the surface, gives the appearance of a woodcut of the musculature below the skin. With the "women" pieces the coloring is more careful and calculated with primitive designs struck onto the rendered surface.
Scott Richter has not only given shape to metamorphoses we thought possible only in dreams and cartoons, he has fashioned those shapes into powerful and affecting sculpture that entice and coax the viewer to recall previously dormant areas of the imagination.
(Arts, November 1985)