Word: wilmarth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mallarme had written of the impalpable reality that poetry must somehow approach: "To conjure up the negated object, with the help of allusive and always indirect words, which constantly efface themselves in a complementary silence . . . comes close to the act of creation." Wilmarth's singular project was to create the spirit of reverie that surrounds the "negated object," but in that most object-affirming of arts, sculpture, and to seek its poetic effects in heavy industrial materials -- steel and glass. Typically, Wilmarth, a Californian who spent most of his working life in New York City, adopted...
...artist of Wilmarth's age there was nothing radical about steel. It was the bronze of modernism, the normal substance of constructed sculpture for the past 60 years and more. What was unusual was his decision to combine it with glass and thus make transparency, as much as spatial enclosure, a part of the sculptural effect. Wilmarth loved light. It was his madeleine, a trigger of memory, as a particular smell might be to others: "I associate the significant moments of my life with the character of light at the time." In fact, glass came before steel in his work...
...association of glass with steel that gives his work its peculiar evocative power. Wilmarth worked the glass, bending it discreetly and etching it with hydrofluoric acid. This frosted the panels and brought out their color, which varied from a cold ice green to a soft, almost moonstone blue, diffused on the face but sometimes concentrated with sharp energy within the edges. The dark steel, seen through this translucency, lost its declarative character; it blurred, and became a presence, or rather an immanence: something very much there yet hard to define...
...large works like the Nine Clearings for a Standing Man, 1973, Wilmarth achieved the kind of grandeur of light and pared-down form that one associates with Rothko at his best, and something more: the sense of a figure, not described but evoked by a flat vertical plane, behind the glass. Even in a smaller piece like Is, Was (Chancing), 1975-76, there is a fascinating exchange between dark and light, solidity and translucency, underwritten by the economical logic of its making: a single sheet of steel cut and folded, a single plate of glass. And the cables that hold...
...Wilmarth's later work of the '80s, the hidden figure becomes explicit. Wilmarth's sign for it was in part a homage to Brancusi: an egg-shaped form, a glass sign for a head. Sometimes it appears on its own -- once, in a piece called Sigh, 1979-80, with the "face" cut away and resting resignedly inside the egg, an image of exquisite poignancy. Usually the head is fixed to a metal plaque with edges and attachments that suggest a window frame, and thus someone (the sculptor himself) looking out into our space. These pieces are darker and less restrained...