Wendell
Dayton/Hei Myung Hyun
LA Artcore
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Wendell Dayton and Hei Myung Hyun create unprepossessing
works that steal upon the eye in various irruptions of the visual field, a
little here, a little something there. Dayton’s sculptures might be
just careless attempts at making a jungle gym, small flat planes
irregularly-shaped in dully-burnished stainless steel à la Smith,
attached to a ligature of pipes or beams flexed or off-kilter. You walk
around Untitled No. 10, and suddenly the round O of the painter stares
from an extension that disappears as you continue. The leaf shapes or cutouts
seem cursory or minimal, the cuttings show the art. Dayton burnishes out to
the line, a most delicately carven thing like a pencil line. You see his
angles, he’s made abstract steel sculpture like grasses and leaves with
stalks, palmy moon and flowers, stern hard things that catch the subtlest
movement of the eye in nature. Hyun has a basis in calligraphic paintings of
bamboo, overlaid with planes of paint and imagery in static levels of
application that won’t hold the surface. It evaporates before your eyes
(which have no sure hold but the bamboo more or less discernible) as the
planes dislocate in ranges of depth, like sitting on tatami in your
paper house with its various articles. The precise calculations of
minutely-organized paint figurations are maddening to contemplate in
themselves (bird outlines, dots) except as tenuous imagery or color on the
threshold of perception, and the eye freely moves in or out of the painting,
amongst its occurrences. Wendell Dayton, Beverly Pepper, George Rickey,
Richard Serra and David Smith make steel sculptures that express the
perceptions of the sculptor’s art in the highest degree, almost
miraculously. Hei Myung Hyun, like Johns or Klee, lets the eye
move about its limits to see with its mind. |
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