30 March 2014

Allan Wexler: Breaking Ground

"Allan Wexler: Breaking Ground" at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts

Soho: 31 Mercer Street, New York, NY

Ends May 3rd, 2014

Images: http://www.feldmangallery.com/pages/home_frame.html

Allan Wexler in "Breaking Ground," explores subtle origins of architecture and construction -- ground cuts and trenches, adobe bricks and mined stone, trees transformed into columns, planks, sheathing, shingles and winged branches. These are shown in arrayed material display samples, single and multiple wall panels, floor sculptures poised to launch, inviting to stroke.

Monochromatic, or nearly so, with slightest of color and texture variations, reminding of the primordial, perdurable, desert devoid of greenery, of hued and camouflaged animals, of machinery and oil wells, of warmaking and savagery, of grostequeries of petro-wealth real estate venality and vanity bragging of starchitecture's environmental desecration and indentured worker hostility.

	Gravity, 2013 hand-worked inkjet prints on panel 32 x 40 inches each overall dimension variable
	Pour, 2012 hand-worked inkjet prints on panel 32 x 40 inches
Ramp, 2013 hand-worked inkjet prints on panel 32 x 40 inches	Engagement, 2012 hand-worked inkjet prints on panel 32 x 40 inches

Wexler has made images of fundamental, personal, creative groundbreaking without commercial and professional fanfare, ribbon cutting, silly hard hats and investors, banks, lawyers, unions and promoters adancing with once used shovels.

Contemplating his work is deeply pleasurable (for this architect), comparing in mind's eye of revoltingly ugly and bloated structures featured in polychromicly lurid design publications adverting smart (sic) glass and exoticly toxic metals manufactured with worst of natural harm.

Wexler's work is pleasing and  inspiring for an essential truth, a single architect has designed and built these works, not a team of thousands necessary to foster the illusion that famous architects build, for they do not.

Wexler has built with his own eyes, hands, brain, imagination and conscience an architecture for human sanctuary against all too common exploitation of need for shelter and vainglory.