"Christopher Wilmarth: Every Other Shadow had a Song to Sing".

"Christopher Wilmarth: Every Other Shadow had a Song to Sing" at Robert Miller Gallery, New York. April 7-May 6, 2000

Christopher Wilmarth worked in the materials of modern urban architecture: glass, steel, and cable. Though a student of the architect and sculptor Tony Smith, Wilmarth made sculptures too imbued with light, too expressive of human longing to be understood as strictly minimalist. In 1974, he wrote that he was "concerned with the complex problem of implying the human presence in a non-objective art," a problem he addressed by taking his compressed experiences of light and shadow and returning them "to the world as a physical poem." His sculptures have a certain poetic quality shrewdly tempered by their hard geometric planes and by the ubiquity and commonness of the materials themselves. By juxtaposing wall-mounted sculptures with freestanding ones and including a set of seven watercolors and two late untitled drawings, the spring show at Robert Miller's capacious new space in Chelsea seemed to emphasize the graphic, almost pictorial, character of the artist's sculptural work.

Wilmarth achieved this distinctive mix of the graphic and the sculptural through his signature use of cable and by brushing planes of glass with acid, giving them a streaked and frosted look. In Stocking Stairs Blue (1976), a single length of cable holds an arcing, convex panel of blue-green glass against a wall at eye level. The cable runs vertically down the outside of the translucent glass, passing through a drilled hole to run horizontally across the back side of the glass, then out another hole and up the outside again, thereby describing a rectangle on the upper-half of the plane. It is an elegant, apparently simple work in two materials, and yet Wilmarth manages to suggest a number of associations in the way he combines them. While the shape and brittleness of the glass remind us that the piece is a sculpture, Wilmarth, by stringing the cable in front and behind the glass, evokes the varying pressures of graphite on paper. The work's size and placement on the wall, as well as the acid streaking, only further the pictorial associations. At times, however, the cable takes on a more functional, somewhat less graphic role, as in Susan Walked In (1976), a larger, freestanding piece in which a strand of cable anchors a plane of glass to a steel, benchlike structure.

In almost all the pieces in this show, color--of the glass itself, and how it changes when viewed from different angles, when it overlaps with other plates of glass or steel; of the steel itself, and of the rust patterns on it--plays a surprisingly central part. Occupying a large room with generously luminous skylights, Days on Blue (1974-77), the centerpiece, inevitably called to mind Richard Serra's metal walls. But Wilmarth worked on a slightly smaller, more human scale, and the piece has none of the tilting precariousness of a Serra. A horizontal plane of glass the size of a large painting cuts through a much larger and longer plate of steel, freeing it of some of its weight, opening it up. Light on the glass reflects a range of blues and greens, causing its acid-brushed striations to resonate with the rust patterns on the steel. Much could be said, too, of the colors in the moody smaller sculptures using glass bulbs mounted on steel, which hung in a room with the series of lovely and delicate watercolor sketches from which they were derived. For instance, in When Winter on Forgotten Woods Moves Somber (1979-80), repeating ovoids create a mise-en-abime of shapes with shifting color values. Blue patination stains on the steel play off against the blue of the glass bulb.

Wilmarth committed suicide in 1987 at forty-four. One can only hope that his work continues to gain the recognition that was largely denied him during his lifetime.