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Stephen De Staebler at Paul Thiebaud
Art in America, Feb, 2005 by Mark Van Proyen
The six freestanding bronze figural sculptures in this recent exhibition dated from 2003, but all featured elements that echoed the artist's earlier works. In a kind of recombinant assemblage process, Stephen De Staebler uses and reuses ceramic forms gleaned from what he calls his "boneyard," a 40-year-old collection of failed kiln firings. For several decades, De Staebler has incorporated these fragments, Frankenstein-like, into clay sculptures. Only on rare occasions, though, has he cast them in bronze, so this gathering was an exceptional treat.
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Standing a bit over 6 feet tall, the bronzes had received a light, slightly pinkish, gray-ocher patina that strongly evokes classical statuary. Each work emphasized the dual nature of the human body in art--materially realized yet spiritually expressive--with a striking juxtaposition of elements that seem crudely archaic (the "boneyard" features) and classically refined (the dominant figural form). Some of the more archaic-looking details are almost geological in character, recalling the baroque mineral deposits that are the residues of geothermal activity, while others appear as if they had been extracted from the architectural rubble of an ancient civilization. Contrasting with these rough elements, the principal component of each bronze is an elongated body, with delicately modeled surfaces and much polished detail, which in some instances can seem to be extricating itself from the material that adheres to it. Such forms began appearing in De Staebler's work in the late 1980s; they are always female or androgynous, their faces smoothed into placid, featureless ovals that exude serenity.
Some of the bronzes are caryatidlike figures with limbs missing, and it is not at all clear whether they are intended as representations of amputees or references to the damage that time metes out to antique sculpture. For example, the figure in Winged Woman on One Leg (2003) is securely balanced and seems to levitate from the pedestal. On her right shoulder rests an angular slab, a crude version of the wing of the title and, perhaps, a tribute to the famed, and famously damaged, Winged Victory. For De Staebler, however, the point is not a celebration of military or political triumph, but rather a visualization of the human quest for spiritual lightness, for a transcendent peace.
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