Word: catalan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...early Dali was a different matter, an insecure and ravenously aggressive young dandy, wringing an uncanny poetry not only from his own neurosis but also from the psychic inflammations of Europe in the 1920s and '30s. Like his fellow Catalan Joan Miro, Dali was deep-dyed with images of place, among them the contorted rocks and flat beaches of the coast near the town of Figueras, where he grew up, and the flowing, bizarre buildings of Barcelona's master of art nouveau, Antonio Gaudi...
Spain has the Catalan sculptor Susana Solano, 42, whose constructions of sheet iron, mesh and rods are based on the image of baths and attain a weird intensity in balancing the plain, structurally explicit means of minimalism against an atmosphere of secrecy and menace: they could be prison cells or metaphorical labyrinths...
...season's shows in Manhattan, one that was unaccountably ignored by critics is Xavier Corbero's at the BlumHelman Warehouse (through June 11). At 53, Corbero, a Catalan who lives in Barcelona, is one of the best though most idiosyncratic sculptors in Europe; his show, "The Catalan Opening," contains work of such metaphorical richness, variety and wit that one would need to be an aesthetic pruneface not to enjoy...
...Catalan opening is, of course, a chess gambit. Corbero's exhibition is a set of 16 black chess pieces -- king and queen, hulking monoliths more than 9 1/2 ft. high, and a whimsical army of knights, bishops, rooks and pawns, all carved and constructed from basalt. This brittle volcanic rock is too hard to chisel cleanly; it can only be sawed or broken like a flint. Corbero revels in the risks of breaking it. Each piece of basalt becomes a found object -- altered, but bearing a memory of the raw look it had in the quarry...
...just Catalan in name. It prolongs the spirit of older Barcelonan artists and architects, a sense of material fantasy that still saturates the place and gives Corbero's work its sardonic, free-associating air and its obsessively fine craftsmanship. There are delicious Miroesque touches in this show, like the comb jauntily set on the queen's head, grooved with the bars of the Catalan shield, or the wacky little pyramid that balances on the needle peak of a pawn called Miss Capicua, 1987-88. Other details resurrect the images of heraldic encounter, the dungeons and dragons that lie within...