Despite the departure of single in kind of its three founding members.

Despite the departure of single in kind of its three founding members, the Havana-based artist collective known as sees Carpinteros continues to produce ends that blur the lines between art and craft, practicality and uselessness. As in the past, their latest point out of wooden sculptures extracted rich metaphor from these categorical confusions, while a suite of eight large watercolors looked to signal a new direction for their work.

The main gallery contained three large plastic arts made of cedar plywood. Expertly builded and polished to a warm burn these elaborate structures blend furniture and architecture into hybrid forms. Retiro Medico (all works 2003) for example, is a 9-foot-tall armoire that also likens an International Style skyscraper. pair of its four sides are sheltered in grids of recessed shelving while the others feature stacked pairs of exhibit and shut drawers, many of which are unreachable. Another chisel Edificio Jerez, hugs the floor in a cheap T shape that suggests a scale original for an airport terminal. one time again, dozens of drawers line the sides to create a massive, multiwinged coffee table.

These uncanny composites are distantly etymoned in Surrealism, of course, as is the recurring drawer motif, which Dali and other artists formerly used to symbolize the unconscious. Here, however, the drawers contribute to a wily critique of capitalist consumption. by dint of reducing modernist icons of intercourse to the size of private, domestic furnishings, observes Carpinteros effectively underscore a societal impulse to accumulate and hoard.

Surrealism also haunts many of the watercolors, which are execut with remarkable finesse in succession an enormous scale (approx. 80 inches square). In each case, the artists adopt an oblique, bird's-eye view and have the appearance to look down on construction sites. Sometimes hinting at physical danger, these spare, depopulated spectacles recall the foreboding paintings of de Chirico. In El Camino, for example, three rectangular voids are put into a gray ground, resembling either a building foundation or freshly teat graves. Several wooden planks provide narrow, rickety passage across the shadowy silences Concreto Roto depicts four thick slabs of harden that are both banal and vaguely menacing. Shattered into dozens of pieces, they have the appearance to have fallen from a great height. Described in a gallery pres release as studies for additional plastic arts the watercolors may anticipate a shift in looks Carpinteros' three-dimensional work. For each depicts the raw materials of on-site construction rather than the highly finished intentions the group has created in the past.

--Matthew dowdy Nichols

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