Eloquent liar: the recent sculptures of Judith Schwarz (exhibition).

The recent sculptures of Judith Schwarz (exhibited last fall at SL Simpson Gallery in Toronto) are more than is at first suggested by their elegant and refined surfaces. Montreal writer, James Campbell proposes that the apparent simplicity is a cover for depth, substance and challenge. He describes a seduction that is simultaneously a test of our eligiblity as viewers.

The five new wall sculptures Judith Schwarz exhibited at S.L. Simpson are eloquent liars. Between six to ten feet in length and made from steel, slate and wood, they creatively dissemble in order to draw us into a perceptual drama wherein assumption seeks to triumph over proof. The ongoing tension between what seems a rigidly ordered geometry and an open matrix of meanings draws out that drama and distends it right into the heart of my physical self. If the insistent physicality of the work is a lure and the geometric structure a staggered perceptual trap, its expressive design is the spring for that trap. The trap is sprung not only in the eye but, more importantly, in the imagination of the observer - who then becomes a willing accomplice in the making of meaning.

In the main gallery space, TORCH and BYTE, both executed in flamecut plate steel, evince a deceptive simplicity. On the left wall as I enter, the large ellipsoid form of BYTE draws me along its flank. The metallic grid-like structure within the ellipsoid contours has been pierced with innumerable X-shaped forms and has a specific gravity that is unavoidable in its effects. As I am drawn towards the ellipse, the gap between facticity - the impression of a physically determinate object - and indetermination - the impression of an object in perceptual flux - widens appreciably for me. At first, the hypnotic clarity of the work's internal logic and orderliness is almost incandescent. Then, as the optic is drawn into the interstices between the myriad component elements, the logic begins to go dark and resolution is lost.

The structural logic of the work perhaps reflects the inordinate degree of precision afforded by computer design routines. In fact, the title BYTE refers to the use of the computer in the preliminary design of all the exhibited works. The X-shaped forms echo the pixels that render computer data visible on the screen, while the gaps remind us of the spaces between pixels, points of slippage which effectively ensure that the image never resolves into stasis. Similarly, the forms and gaps here ensure the perceptual restlessness induced by the work.

My first impression of BYTE as a wholly determinate object, fixed immovably to the wall plane, is suddenly uprooted and supplanted by systemic doubt about that stasis and fixity. This is true for the X-shape of TORCH as well, which holds the right wall of the lower gallery in its steely grip. TORCH demonstrates that facticity is, at best, a transient limit for sculpture that does not conveniently end where its frame ends. The repetition of the internal motifs here once again organizes the whole structure and undermines any belief I may have entertained about the stasis of that organization. The myriad gaps increase the sculpture's depth-of-field but as I pull back from it, I lose sharp focus and a perceptual discontinuity results. This is no mean feat for a sculptor whose roots are avowedly in a Minimalist tradition. For, if our perception can be said to truly end in objects, as the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty once suggested, then once constituted, these sculptural objects prove themselves completely open-ended.

Three additional sculptures were situated in the upper gallery space. GEO (executed in slate tiles on steel support), and GRID and GRID TWO (executed in steel and birch plywood), count among Schwarz's most seductive and dissembling works. Here, the heuristic ambiguities that are a hallmark of her sculpture are very much in evidence. GEO is a consummately restless shape, cantilevered off-axis and seemingly arrested in mid-movement. It gives rise to a spontaneous reversal in depth and the possible variations seem to form an open set. I must disentangle the skein of my psychological and somatic relations to the work within a highly disjunctive context where the possibility of a figure/ground reversal is ever present. And these continuing perspectival transformations entail, at least for this viewer, an ongoing gestalt shock.

GRID-TWO sets up a strange figure-ground relationship. The ground here is the birch plywood plane, which is integral to the work and cannot be reduced to the status of a mere support. It is a relationship in which the outward steel-rendered image relates to the wood ground as though it were hinged or levered to it. Here, a two-dimensional surface space suddenly takes on an unlikely three-dimensional depth. The webbed steel ellipse seems to be torquing in on the wood plane as though it were a simulacrum, mould or base for it. But the field-shape is by no means identical to the shape of the plywood ground, and Schwarz effectively subverts the cubist and minimalist framing strategy of having each internal member conform to the edge of the support. This stepping outside the modernist polemic is just one of several indications of the radicality and newness of Schwarz's work.

The works exhibited recall for us the Latin word templum, denoting something cut out - but cut out of what? Beyond the steel plate itself, which has obviously been flamecut, they seem to have been cut out of or to have displaced a segment of space itself. As a spatial cut-out, the work plays upon the tension between the security of an inner space and the instability of an outer space; the sculpture in relation to the stability of its frame (here, precisely the destabilizing element) and the alien presence yet material familiarity of the artefact.

The expressive design mentioned earlier welcomes our embodiment as a clue towards resolving its formal and perceptual complexity. Yet, this only serves to increase the somatic intensity felt as we struggle to "solve" the sculpture. We can never reconcile our body-image with the physical limits of the sculpture. It continues to elude us. Understood in this sense, the work is a lure for my embodied imagination, for it asks that I address it as a whole creature and, if I cannot do this, makes the most of my fragmented state. This quandary is important to point out, since so much of the commentary on Schwarz is rife with references to the nature/culture dichotomy (albeit a valid point) and other issues in her work rather than the physical attraction, perceptual contrarity and living flux that is to my mind their central concern.

These wall sculptures command their own space(s) effortlessly. The clarity of their iconography, the suppleness of the artist's methodology and economic use of materials disguise/enhance multilayered dialectical objects that go a long way towards proving that deceit can sometimes be less a sin than a virtue.