James Renner at Soma - San Diego, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, Sept, 1997 by Leah Ollman

Working in the tradition of sculptural assemblage, James Renner makes human, animal and hybrid figures from furniture scraps, machine fragments and various cast-off bits of wood and metal. California's funky, junky, Beat-derived assemblage of the 1950s and '60s is a distant relative, but Renner's work has less to do with accretion than with refined creation. The simple, functional objects that serve as Renner's raw ingredients are not just recycled; they are reincarnated, infused with new vigor and purpose.

His three "Periphetical Figures," each about a foot high, have the reductive grace and integrity of late-industrial-age fertility goddesses. In one, a clock hand pointing upward doubles as a long, slender neck with teardrop-shaped head, while a jagged-toothed sawblade becomes the billowing ruffles of a skirt. In another, a fork, pointing downward, reads as a body's upper torso, the two outermost tines like arms arching forward gently in a gesture of offering.

Renner is a forager, reclaiming abandoned goods and exhuming their essences. His totemic figures, elegant and concentrated as poetry, evolve from wooden dowels, rusted gears and miscellaneous hooks, prongs and bolts. The process attests to the infinite fertility" and "inexhaustible vitality" of matter, as described by the prewar Polish writer Bruno Schulz, whom Renner acknowledges as an important influence. Schulz's "Treatise on Tailors' Dummies, or The Second Book of Genesis" (from his 1934 fictional work The Street of Crocodiles) reads like a personal manifesto for Renner. Like the narrator of the tale, the artist embraces the "humus of memories" to be found in the trash heap's rusted, worn and weathered refuse, and champions the demiurgic impulse to create an alternate reality from it.

An oblique mythology begins to define itself through Renner's portentous (and occasionally whimsical) figures. In The Ninth Egg and Summit, avian creatures with looping iron necks clasp wooden eggs with their claws, guarding the delicate vessels sense of new life with a profound sense of purpose. Renner's small gouache illuminations also suggest narratives that relate to origins. A Small Creation Myth takes an egglike oval, fills it with human figures falling, pointing, emerging, and wraps it in a short text written in a coded, mysterious hand. It begins, "Who was this stranger, who came like a hailstone. . .," evoking the sudden appearance of a creator, like Renner himself, whose work is at once revelatory and organic.