Charles Arnoldi
Chac Mool Gallery, Los Angeles ARTnews, April 1999
It's not about the spuds, of course. A new series of sculptures and large-scale paintings by Charles Arnoldi chooses the humble potato as its subject, but they are no more about potatoes than his earliest work was about twigs. Arnoldi first came to prominence in the 1960s with wall-mounted or free-standing assemblages of twigs and branches, some of them painted, which challenged assumptions about the relationship between line and volume, painting and sculpture, two- and three-dimensional form.
His potatoes are all black. In the paintings, vastly overscaled, they appear singly or in groups, in high gloss or matte acrylic against washy backgrounds with occasional splashes of attenuated color. While at first sight they invite comparison with Donald Sultan's lemons, closer attention suggests that these paintings are not about the enigma of phenomenological presence, but rather about the dangerous movement of mass through space, the collision of quasi-planetary bodies, black suns in a cosmos that seems about to wobble toward the brink of chaos. Their appeal is in their energy, at once powerful and unnerving, projecting toward the viewer some of the same intimation of violence as suggested in Arnoldi's earlier chain-saw assaults on laminated surfaces of plywood.
Indeed, without the bronze sculptural groupings included in the exhibition, we might not even associate the painted forms with the potato. Varying both in scale and in representational intent, the sculptures are insistently playful and benign: some are massive, others no bigger than your average supermarket spud; some are content to be life-like potatoes, eyes and all, while others are stylized into rounded sculptural form, as pleasing as a Buddha's belly. Their relationship to the two-dimensional works, however, is perplexing: their energy, however playful, remains relatively static, and risks detracting from the more volatile power of the paintings.
