Balance and Paradox: The Work of Steven Careau
There are days of concentrated sculptural activity; and then days of no sculptural activity, in the studio. During the activity, the studio fills with the detritus and mess of artistic activity; during the days of no artistic activity, the studio becomes ever cleaner and tidier until it is absolutely clean and tidy, as though it were never otherwise. There are periods of work and periods of contemplation: Careau returns to a single square of composite over six years of scraping and chiselling and twenty layers of varnish; and objects lie in the studio unused until they reveal their potential, how they should be used—sometimes after eighteen years. There are the sharply defined edges of the geometrical wall pieces, whether straight or circular, and the intensity of their darkness against the white wall; and there are the washy, fading edges of the shapes on paper suggesting elements of the natural world—birds, moths, butterflies, flower heads. And yet the concision of all of Careau's forms, like the orderliness of his studio, seems to result from the profound respect with which he approaches his materials and his work: there is respect for the form of the objects he creates—he will not obscure them; and there is, in his patient attentiveness to the works over time, respect for the potentials of the materials—he will not rush them into being before their moment.
There is deliberate intention in his working of the pieces; and then there is his allowance for a part to be played by chance, accident, or an outside agent: a shaped piece of material is handed to Careau by a friend and when, in time, he uses it, it opens new possibilities in his work; or a cutting torch is wielded by another hand and the marks of the cut, not Careau's marks, remain in the finished piece. There is the deliberate motion of Careau's hand brushing the India ink over the paper; and then there is the element of unpredictability that comes with the differences in the types of paper used or the agricultural lime with which he will strew the surface—a later batch will perhaps contain magnesium, for instance, and this will change the color of the finished work to a degree whose nuances Careau cannot foresee precisely.
The wall pieces are still; and yet there is the illusion of motion out along an arm and back to the rectangular or triangular shape. The motion is in the mind of the observer: one's eye travels out, circles, and travels back, reproducing a pattern that Careau sees in the motions, large and small, performed daily, hourly, by everyone, in every way: go out, do a piece of work, perform some action, and return. It is a universal pattern, but it is also a particular pattern, it is the pattern of reading and writing, and it is also the pattern of plowing a field, with which Careau is deeply familiar from his own experience of it: go out across the field, turn, and come back; go out, turn, and come back. Careau has internalized and transformed the angular and rhythmic complexity of skilled plowing, and its absolute beauty.
If there is horizontal or angular two-dimensional motion out and back through space, there is also horizontal (forward into the future) or vertical (down the years) motion through time, but this motion has been halted. It is present, it is implied, but frozen, because these pieces are meant to be permanent, not to decay, not to change over time: the layers of bluing, as for a gun barrel, prevent the steel from rusting; the archival paper and glass-covered frames prevent the works on paper from yellowing, crumbling, or rotting. The very act of preservation, however, adds to the visual effect of the pieces:
each added layer of oil, for instance, not only preserves but increases the sheen of the surface. And curiously, while the works on paper are preserved in time, locked into the physicality of their present state of being, moments removed from the stream of moments, removed from change, the images, particularly because of the effect of the lime, suggest disintegration of the surface—and so, the illusion or depiction of disintegration is preserved from the actual effect of decay.
There is the extreme lightness and grace of the pieces on the wall; and the extreme density and heft, off the wall, of the actual shapes of steel which compose many of them, when held in the hand. There is the suggestion of the intellectual, for instance in the motion out and back of reading and writing; and there is the emphatic physicality of the materials, the gouges of the chisel and the striation of the sander. And, finally, there is the tension between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality: the three-dimensionality of the blocks of steel or composite and the two-dimensionality of the films of varnish, ink, and oil applied to the surfaces; the suggestive linearity of the wall pieces and their ultimate insistence on their third dimension out from the wall; the illusion of two-dimensionality in the works on paper and yet, in the subtle roughness of the lime, the sculptor's clear intention and approach to the work as the creation of three-dimensional entities in space, again achieving paradox and balance.
Lydia Davis