May 29, 1987
This is Alan Saret’s first one-man gallery exhibition in New York since 1980, and he wants to show what he can do. His knotted and open wire sculptures – like scribbles by Cy Twombly detached from the canvas and allowed to draw themselves in space – are on the floor, wall or ceiling. Their vocabulary of circles and cubes is Minimalist. Mr. Saret’s feeling for line and void seems Oriental.
There is a lot of art history here. ”In the Flats” is a wall piece that seems to spin like the wheels of a chariot. ”Ancient End” sits squat on the floor like a guardian sculpture, except that far from being bulky and blocklike, half of it seems composed mostly of air. The most recent work, ”Gods and Men,” uses rods of stainless steel to compose a freestanding image that suggests jugglers, a sculptural group by Kenneth Armitage, the rising, pyramidal movement in Gericault’s ”Raft of the Medusa” and currents of energy in Chinese landscape painting.
Mr. Saret has artistic roots both in the expressionist mysticism of the 1950’s and the geometric rationalism of the 1960’s. One of the key issues his work raises is the possibility of combining pragmatism and idealism, technology and faith. He wants control, and he wants release. He wants to make computers, fancy and freedom compatible. His struggle to hold together very different orientations is evidence that something is at stake. But whether these orientations can indeed reinforce and spark one another, rather than just coexist, is another story.
