Rome — Paul Klerr, American Academy in Rome
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Critique en anglais de l'exposition « Vertical Art » à l'American Academy in Rome (11 décembre 1978 – 6 janvier 1979). Edith Schloss décrit trois grandes sculptures blanches qui font saillie du mur à 180°, qualifiées de « sculpture paintings », et les plus petits « drawing reliefs ». Texte crucial pour comprendre la théorie du Vertical Art comme fusion de peinture et sculpture.
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Rome '| Paul Klerr, American Academy in Rome, Via A. Masina 5, Rome, to Jan. 6. Klerr grew up in America and It- aly and studied in both countries. His new work is about catching the essence, the possibilities of space and light. Three large new white pieces, in ingenious contrasts of mass and void, jut out from the wall — forms enveloping each other, swirling and uncoiling, touched by subtle shade or deepened into per- spectives, weight balancing thinness — and enfolding a delicate airiness. All three, sliced, layered, both solid and light, maintain a purposely un- finished quality, so that the spring of their energy may go on indefi- nitely. The big convoluted forms are made of canvas held by plaster of paris, and in places are screened by fiberglass agitated by little flocks of brushmarks. Coming out from the wall at a 180-degree angle, Klerr calls them “Vertical Art,” meaning they are neither to be considered head-on like a flat painting, nor to be circumvented in the round like a sculpture. They are a most unusual and happy fusion of both. The small pieces, which Klerr calls “Drawings,” are another joining of two mediums, another duality, just as particular and impossible to clas- sify as the others. Here, instead of drawing with a pen or another kind of stylus on paper, Klerr makes in- cisions through it, so that the travel- ing line is a narrow interstice for the light to peek through, and the gouged-out slivers, little prongs and shreds come forward or recede, cre- ating additional planes and shad- ows. To make this even more intri- cate the paper is allowed to play against the glass that partly sur- rounds and protects it. White sheets of paper, cut, folded, twisted — of- ten suspended from a thread like a mobile — are framed by transpar- ent shiny bits and staves and trian- gles of clear glass-building small en- tities of space, mysterious traps for light, whose true dimensions reach out much beyond their own volume. Klerr in his new monumental pieces — his “sculpture paintings” — and in his smaller “drawing reliefs,” with the sparest and most fragile of ls, has invented a complex