Fernando Alcolea, 19 April – 21 May
In his first New York one-person show, James Croak, a maverick among today’s late minimalists, demonstrated that there is juice left in the tradition of figurative Surrealism, especially that of Magritte and, possibly, Bellmer. Nearly life-size dolls, infant forms made of dark compacted dirt were shown frontally and at eye-level, looking as if their backs had been nailed to the white wall. Something comfortingly familiar became strange and frightening. This is not to say that Croak is unaware of the social condition of art today, With their dimpled bodies, ingratiating expressions, and (when clothed) cute outfits, his babies also say "buy me". But the associative richness of the images counterbalances their mercantile aspects.
Typical of American artists of his generation (he was born in 1951), Croak emerged from art school an abstract artist, and his first metal sculptures echoed Tony Smith’s primary structures. The shift toward was more poetic than the logical, and truer to life’s quirky ways, determined his next moves. Croak began to produce what he himself calls "monsters", winged figures, centaurs and other mythological beasts, made from earth mixed with a plastic binder. Other creatures came to resemble normal humans and animals, but Croak disarmed their naturalism by adorning them with totally extraneous though recognisable elements, such as trees growing from the fur of a lion.
His first "dirt babies" date from the time, the mid and late 80s, when he was also making dirt adults, pitiful life-size creatures limply hanging as if they too had been "nailed". With these new simplified images, Croak was at last discarding metaphor in the Surrealist sense ("the fortuitous encounter of distant realities on a plane unsuitable to either") in favor of what might be called the Lacanian metaphor, whereby the metaphor does not spring from the conjunction of two images but from the displacement of one signifier by another.
In spite of their surface naturalism, Croak’s babies embody the three stages of life. Infants formed form a dust-like medium, with the gestures and expressions of adults, they simultaneously imply birth, maturity and death. "Nailed" to the wall, they conflate in a single image.