Michihiro Kosuge at Laura Russo - Portland, Ore

This exhibition comprised six abstract sculptures by the consummate stone carver of the Pacific Northwest. Michihiro Kosuge is known throughout the region for public commissions in granite and basalt, often incorporating flowing water with the rough-hewn rock. If these evoke the contemplative garden environments of his native Japan, Kosuge's independent work also acknowledges a European tradition: stone obelisks and classical columns, the sculptural bust, a reprise of Brancusi's Kiss. Kosuge's devotion to direct carving, moreover, and his interrogation of the sculptural base signal his continuation of Brancusi's legacy.

The small pink- and red-granite pieces in this exhibition (all 2002) introduced a novel compositional element: a central void around which the ponderous stone components are deployed. Four of the sculptures, each about 12 inches tall, bear the title Empty Space--suggesting that the void itself is primary, not just circumstantial. In both Empty Space #2 and #3, a bottom element provides a kind of trough or cradle that supports a lid, giving a sense of purposeful containment. Indeed, the artist acknowledges that he began these boxlike forms after creating a container for the ashes of a lost loved one. The hollowness of the sculptures depends, then, on an original function but, transmuted into art, becomes metaphorical: the emptiness stands poignantly for loss itself, for the gap in life the beloved once occupied. In the elegant Empty Space #1, finely dressed and polished, the top element does not span the central gap but is suspended within it by brass dowels that pierce the sides of the lid and keep it poised and balanced. This delicate equilibrium is countered in the heartbreaking Empty Space #4, where the narrow lid seems to have collapsed into its trough--as if broken by grief.

Appropriately here, Kosuge exploits the funerary associations of his material. Given his sepulchral themes of emptiness and containment, one can't help but conjure the use of polished granite for headstones and mausoleums. The material's permanence becomes topical; like the stone itself, the memory of the departed endures. And memory establishes two terms, the one remembering and the one remembered. Kosuge ponders these terms in Futari #1 and #2, in each case presenting an abstract pink-granite element and a similar black-granite complement, side by side in a way 9that suggests busts. (Futari is Japanese for "pair.") If the juxtaposition triggers an existential meditation on the relationship of the living to the dead, the artist consoles us in these otherwise austere sculptures with the compensatory gift of their formal beauty.

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