Jon Isherwood at John Davis

Stone can be perilous for contemporary sculptors. State-of-the-art tools and methods allow recalcitrant materials to be manipulated with remarkable freedom, but it's easy to fall in love with process itself--which makes Jon Isherwood's recent exhibition of carved stone sculptures all the more impressive. Clearly, his enigmatic forms, with their undulating surfaces and suave profiles, were achieved with a technological assist, yet Isherwood makes technology subservient to form, so that we are engaged visually, emotionally and intellectually well before we start to wonder how the work was made. Even after we discover the complexities of his approach (courtesy of a video installed in an adjacent space), his multivalent, allusive forms continue to declare themselves independently of their revealed history.

Isherwood considers his recent work to be related to the torso and head, an assertion borne out by even the most overtly vessel-like sculptures, most of which, at less than 2 feet high, are scaled to the upper body. In pieces such as Inner Sense and Things Are Not Always What They Seem (both 2003), rounded forms crowned with jaunty bands around their top openings seem to pull themselves up out of thick bases. They read simultaneously as portly bodies and bull-necked heads. The rhythmic striation and pitting of the surface emphasizes the sense of contained volume, but also implies that the stacked, bulging forms are flexible enough to collapse in upon themselves. Yet the roughly cut inflections also diffuse light, dulling the surface of one sculpture's Verde Green marble and obscuring the color changes of the other's creamy travertine, paradoxically making the squatty forms seem more dense and substantial.

The most recent works (2004) were the most unexpected. In Charmed and The Voluptuary, both dark gray Champlain marble and large at about 3 feet tall, Isherwood abandons the container reference for coils of ridged marble that magically spiral upward, as though defying the weight of the stone. The forms allude, fleetingly, to the rounded volumes of Baroque architecture, to shells and sea creatures, to ancient votive objects and even to the upward-striving snake responding to a fakir's flute, without looking like anything but themselves. The Sensualist and Findings, a pair of biomorphic forms, both pocked like wave-battered coral, seem to struggle to heave themselves up from the floor.

How does Isherwood make them? The video showed him drawing with his hands in sand, making mounds and tracing spirals with his fingers. Computers capture these images, which he digitally elaborates before they are realized by computer-directed carving tools. Then Isherwood's hand again takes over the stone, refining, transforming, humanizing. In the end, his mysterious, evocative objects stir our curiosity and our imagination.

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group