Word: marisol
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Some elves with names like Calder, Feininger, Marisol and Jones have in recent years and months been busy making Christmas toys, and this week their work fills Manhattan's Betty Parsons Gallery. Anyone with, say, $5,000 left in his Christmas Club kick will be able to pick up a lot of things like they don't have at F.A.O. Schwarz-not that the kids wouldn't rather have a bikini for their Barbie doll...
Push-&-Pull. Born in Paris of Venezuelan parents, Marisol is a black-haired, wide-eyed, unmarried woman of 33 who speaks in monosyllabic whispers so faint that by comparison Jackie Kennedy would sound like a cheerleader. She works in wood-logs, barrels and planks that she saws apart and nails together. At times her figures seem to be little more than crude painted cutouts; but their oddball incompleteness and the way painted surfaces suddenly and spontaneously emerge into sculpted forms are meticulously planned. Three dimensions sink into two; two grow into three in a sort of Marisol version of Hans...
Some critics have seen in Marisol' sculptures the work of a satirist, but whatever social comment may be inferred is almost always accidental. "I'm thinking only about art and shapes," say Marisol. "If there is social comment, it seems to come out by itself." A sculpture called The Generals, in which two officers, who vaguely resemble Napoleonic marshals, sit astride the same horse, did not start out as a poke at the military. Marisol, it seems, was doing a sculpture of a friend, using a barrel for the torso, when she realized that if she tipped...
...Cocoon. A beam whose upper half had been partially cut away reminded Marisol of the Mona Lisa: as she examined the grain of the cutaway part, she thought she saw the famous smile. She painted in the face, guided by the grain, and added a pair of plaster hands around the middle of the beam. The result looks as if the Mona Lisa were about to emerge from some sort of wooden cocoon...
...Marisol is quite solemn about her work, but somewhere in her mind is a sparkling reservoir of wit and an ability to phantasize that is as rich as a child's. Her art is that of the toymaker, whose creations are specifically designed to appeal to that part of the mind in which fantasy and reality seem identical. The only difference is that a toy can be outgrown; it seems doubtful that the same will soon be said of the work of Marisol...