Marta Chilidron

In her first solo show following five years of collaboration with conceptual artist Eduardo Costa. Marta Chilindron offered three full-sized constructions and five variously scaled maquettes. A New York sculptor of Uruguayan origin who trained at SUNY, Chilindron has worked for the past 16 years primarily with furniture forms. Most often her "groupings" include recognizable versions of chair, bed, table or bookcase, which she transforms into near abstractions by severely flattening or angling their shape so that they appear extremely foreshortened. Some of the works, like the show's ghostly gray wooden piece from 1985, wedge themselves into the juncture between wall and floor; others are freestanding. In either case, the artist's spatial manipulations result in a strikingly poetic, Minimalist version of these commonplace objects. Chilindron is clearly interested in the volumetric relations between the components of each piece. No. 101 (1997), for example, is quite large-112 inches high by 132 inches wide-but compressed into a depth of only 15 inches. The various elements of the work-skewed renditions of an armoire, a bed and a bookcase-intensify the viewer's feeling that the contents of an entire room have been almost completely squashed into two dimensions. No. 102 (1997), an 81-by-70-by-13-inch maquette made of foamcore, also speculates on the proportional relations of different shapes: a "chair" against a "table" against two flat rectangles (representing a cupboard and a painting). Their uniform white color tends to idealize the Basic geometric forms. No. 103 (1997), the most abstracted sculpture in the show, is composed of three triangular blocks placed in a line on the floor. These elements present a series of slight variations: one end section (derived from a lying-down wall shelf) is solid, the middle unit (from an upright armchair) incorporates an overhanging rectangular "headrest" form, and the third part (from a recumbent desk) is open in its center. Made of a concretelike synthetic material covering a wooden frame, the piece feels monumental despite its moderate size-the tallest element is bit more than 3 feet high. Chilindron's skillful handling of geometries works no matter what the scale. Even the smallest models for earlier sculptures (two were wall-hung here, two on pedestals) look as though their translation into larger dimensions would be compelling. Several of the 10-inch-high maquettes seem to explode outward from a single horizontal axis, thus appearing massive despite their tabletop size. The show's title, "Dimensions," suggested the artist's strong focus on the reciprocity between perspectival renderings and sculpture. The viewer is constantly reminded (by odd vantage points and abrupt juxtapositions) that the act of seeing is equally retinal and conceptual. One detects here an affinity both to the object-shadow drawings of Brazil's Regina Silveira and, more distantly, to the mid-century constructivism of Joaquín Torres-Garciá and his followers (this gallery's usual fare). For Chilindron, it seems, the mathematical dialogue of forms constitutes a powerful bridge between the domestic and the metaphysical.

Art in America, September, 1997,