Mark Handforth at Roma Roma Roma

Art in America, Jan, 2005 by Cornelia Lauf

Mark Handforth is known for his adaptations of industrial signage and urban "furniture"--billboards, satellite dishes and streetlights. By his own admission, he is inspired by the Miami landscape where his studio is based. But Handforth is a British-born graduate of the Stadelschule in Frankfurt and London's Slade School of Fine Art, and just spent a year in Rome. He has a significant history of exhibitions in Glasgow, Lyon, Los Angeles, Turin and elsewhere. While citing the local, Handforth makes his work with an eye to a decidedly international context and history, from Surrealism and Pop to the art of his former teacher, Martin Kippenberger, and contemporary furniture-as-sculpture designers such as Tobias Rehberger and Jorge Pardo.

For his first solo show in Rome, Handforth prepared five new pieces (all 2004) that seem to be found manufactured objects, but are not. Untitled (Bent Pipe) is a huge, hollow aluminum tube, bent in two places and fixed to the wall like a snapped soda straw. Partial Stop is a free-standing curved sheet of thin aluminum that looks like the remains of an enormous street sign but bears vinyl reflective decals designed by Handforth. Sinking Star and Deepest Purple are two star-shaped works that incorporate standard fluorescent lights. Handforth adds custom touches like white metal tips on the former and psychedelic-colored gels on the latter. In the gallery's garden, an untitled welded-iron candelabra bearing multicolored candles created a beautiful effect. And there was the earlier Vespa Fountain (2001), a motorcycle belching steam through holes in its bronze seat.

None of these works is entirely industrial; all of them bear some traces of the hand. Beyond the machine and the artist, there is the unpredictable hand of nature. The wax candles drip. The motorcycle's steam makes a rainbow. Handforth's sculptures also conjure up a wealth of art-historical moments: Claes Oldenburg's pencil sculpture, the fluorescent tubes of Dan Flavin, the galvanized steel of Richard Serra, the stars of Gilberto Zorio. The crude iron candelabra is reminiscent of Franz West's metal furniture. Vespa Fountain could be a sly nod to Marcel Duchamp's Fountain and perhaps even to the work of Maurizio Cattelan, with whom Handforth shares a strong sense of the absurd. In fact, Handforth has exhibited in Cattelan's Wrong Gallery in New York.

Handforth's talent is to quote without seeming historicist. The sculptures remain modest in effect, despite their blown-up scale, which alludes to the monumental even when the works are installed in a domestic space. For his Rome debut, Handforth had a familiar setting in which to work: he had been commissioned to design the gallery several years ago. There are no right angles, and the show's only illumination came from the fluorescent sculptures. A long zebra-wood bench doubles as a simple step from the black slate-floored gallery into the lush Trastevere garden beyond. Handforth's first exhibition at Roma Roma Roma fused seamlessly with its environment, as if it had always been meant to be there.