Art Review: Don Saco At The Cultural Center

Despite their abstract qualities, Don Saco’s sculptures, on exhibit at the Southampton Cultural Center through January 30, nevertheless maintain powerful reminders of the figurative impulses that characterized his earlier work before moving to the East End in 2003.

Substituting gestural impulse for anatomical purity while still allowing line and shape to delineate movement in space, the works echo Constantin Brancusi’s observation that rather than fantastic hallucinations, abstraction is not unconnected to reality because “what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.” In addition, in their compositional configurations, the artist maintains the strong emotional overtones that dominated his more figurative pieces.

Rather than a twisting torso bent by some invisible force of nature, however, the viewer extrapolates a similarly demonstrative sensation from sensuous abstract forms intertwined in a choreographed ballet of motion and mass. This is accomplished through a dynamic and expressive juxtaposition of positive and negative space, which Mr. Saco uses to conjure mysterious cadences that are, by turns, gently melodious and jarringly cacophonous.

As the violinist Yehudi Menuhin once stated, “Rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.”

In “Fugue,” for example, Mr. Saco uses a dynamic repetition of shapes to create both the sensation of sound and movement as if one were witnessing the material manifestation of music itself. Allowing the overlapping geometric shapes to interact in some sort of silent conversation of form, one can sense harmonic reverberations that ebb and flow, guiding the eye throughout the piece while not dictating to it.

This compositional arrangement is also apparent in “Moonstruck,” which, while expressing a certain frenetic ambiance in the contrasting echoes of repeating forms, nevertheless unites to fashion a coherent chord that is strangely meditative even as it vibrates with energetic motion. Even with this sense of movement, however, another powerful component in the sculptures is the sense they express of abstract structures directly reflecting architectonic impulses.

In works such as “Ascent” or “Balance,” the arrangement of space seems as much a reflection of the functional as the fanciful and, as a result throughout the exhibition, one is constantly reminded of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s definition of architecture as “frozen music.”

But in the final analysis, the most impactful aspect of the works is how the various impulses combine to create highly psychological and emotional tableaus that perhaps unwittingly follow the 19th century author and art colony founder Elbert Hubbard’s admonition that artists should always use “motion to allow emotion.”

In “Wailing Women,” for example, Mr. Saco uses rough-hewn strips of raw black steel that twist and writhe in a macabre dance of anguish. “Agony of Grief” uses a similar structure of torturously overlapping bands perched on spindly rods that are pitted and decayed as if worn away by the rigors of existential torment and time itself.

In other works, such as “Red and Black” or “Entanglements,” these emotional and psychological components are more understated, mitigated in no small part by their bright coloration that imparts an air of childlike whimsy but also in their ties to certain aspects of early 20th century Russian avant-garde sculpture which saw art as uplifting manifestations of humankind’s inevitable perfectibility.

The “Sculpture in Welded Steel 2003-2010” exhibition of Don Saco’s works continues at the Southampton Cultural Center through Sunday, January 30.