Keeping company: sculptures by Alain Kirili and the 19th-century artist Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux were recently juxtaposed in a French museum. The exhibition made the case for the enduring worth of free and direct modeling in contemporary practice - Report From Valenciennes

Art in America, Dec, 2002 by Anne Rochette, Wade Saunders

Here, and elsewhere in the installation, one radical difference between the classical and modern sculptures was made evident. Carpeaux's work, whatever its scale, always incorporates a rendition of, or a sign for, the ground. There is literally no common ground between our bodies and classical figurative sculptures, which exist totally within a represented space. On the other hand, most modern sculpture since Brancusi stands, sits or lies in a space shared with the spectator. Kirili's pieces usually rest directly on the floor or on bases that are an integral part of the work. In this installation they often occupied, as did the Carpeaux works, the ubiquitous white pedestals favored by museums. Even then, Kirili's sculptures seemed to claim a space continuous with our own.

These first rooms of the exhibition offered a subtle range of counterpoints--of facture, material, gesture, color, scale and title. But both the contemporary and historical works might have benefited from a less systematic presentation, since at moments the "pairings" stressed formal similarities to the detriment of the qualities specific to each singular work.

The two following rooms mixed Kirili's pieces cast from clay originals and his fired terracottas. Some sculptures are solo, others are conceived as ensembles. Kirili often advances his work in a helicoidal manner, revisiting and further developing images he has explored previously. In Allegro I (2000), which echoes Indian Curve II (1978), Kirili planted a 9-foot-long, light and limber steel rod in the heart of a gnarly lump of white-and-orange clay set on the floor. The rod arcs out and up from the clay like an insect's antenna, the tip coming lightly to rest in a corner between two walls. There is a gratifying play between the clay--flesh-colored and visually gooey, yet heavy and hard--and the black, springy rod. The piece nicely meshes the constructed and modeled.

The multiple welded-steel elements in the "Commandment" series initially evoked the injunctive aspect of the Old Testament. Kirili has kept extending this strategy--of grouping elements that are related yet differentiated--to other materials, expanding the range of meanings and references. And he has increasingly made bases active elements in the works. In Harlem's Rhythms (1991-92), an arrangement of 15 black terra-cottas on squat, truncated, rough lumber pyramids, the writhing, organic fired-clay forms seem to float over their architectural bases. These latter establish an overall perceptual field and mute the particularity of each modeled sculpture. Kirili created a contrapuntal play by showing Divertissement (1992/2002) in the adjoining room. Here 15 similar wooden bases, casually arranged, display but seven terra-cottas, giving the piece the quality of action arrested.

In the more than 6-foot-high Grandes Nudites I and II (1985), shown in bronze in the museum's entrance hall and in plaster within the exhibition, the two columnlike masses of each pair seem whipped upward by a multitude of gouged troughs, hand-sized and smaller. In the plaster couple the painterliness of facture is accentuated by applied highlights of color, while in the bronzes the verdant patina emphasizes the work's mass over its flickering surface. The Grandes Nudites appear both monolithic (like linga or stele) and baroque (like an agitated sea forever frozen), and it is this doubled duality that is striking.