Robert Taplin's cut installation.

Robert Taplin's cut installation, The Five Outer Planets, is a work the two beautiful and affecting. Entering the in extent darkened main room of the Zilkha Gallery, undivided encountered five pairs of sculpt male bares suspended from the ceiling, each pair comprising a figure made of translucent fiberglass lit from within and its twin, identical in confound and size, formed of white plaster. The five pairs decreased in size down the amplification of the gallery, creating an illusion of deeper space than the space actually held, with the sum of two units pairs nearest the gallery entrance measuring (approximately) brace times life-size, the next sum of two units life-size and the last pair two-thirds life-size. The comparative scales of the paired bodies roughly correspond to those of the five exterior planets of our solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

Comparing heavenly bodies and their attributes to human uniteds is a conceit seemingly as ancient as language, but Taplin makes it of the present day by the tactic, as simple as it is surprising, of doubling each "planet," with the one and the other figures cast from the same clay archetype Contrasting opaque white plaster with the translucent, amber-colored fiberglass and intertwining or arranging the figures individual behind or on top of the other gives rise to intimations of any number of not-necessarily-opposing dualities (sun and satellite moon and planet, thought and de past and near body and soul, ego and id, etc) like symbolism, however, feels tangential to the specificity and ambiguity of the actual materials and forms before us.

The nonpluss and interrelationships of each pair give an inkling of various mini-narratives. The "Jupiter" figures stand back-to-back, arms outstretched, as notwithstanding that each were encompassing the universe yet still watching his back. The sum of two units "Uranus" figures assume fetal positions in a yin-yang relation to each other, appearing to rotate through the whole extent of and over themselves, floating and slumbering seedlike in the amniotic fluid of space. "Pluto," perhaps the most numerous evocative of all, crouches (in resin) with his hands grasping his feet as if in contemplation of his mirror image, inverted beneath him (in plaster), to which he is joined at the feet and hands. This composition is duplicated in a sixth cut quite tiny compared to the others and, at the Zilkha Gallery, isolated without explanation in a separate latitude The self-awareness implicit in the attitude reappearing in this context, is that this companionless planet may be intended to give an account of Earth.

[After Middletown, The Five exterior Planets traveled to Smack Mellon Gallery in Brooklyn]

--Nathan Kernan

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