• Steven Careau: Façons


  • Is it too fine a point to consider all of Steven Careau's work in this show sculpture, rather than sculpture and drawing (or even painting)? The works on paper (the Lime Works) are most obviously drawings, but I think it may be instructive to approach them according to their sculptural signals.

    Among other things, sculptors are deeply interested in materials and in how materials are worked. True to that interest when he speaks with me about this work, Careau concentrates on materials, tools, and process. Admittedly, this is often how artists talk with fellow artists, but in his case, I think his comments are especially instructive. Sculpture is in varying degrees an art form about its ingredients: materials, space, facture, arrangement, scale, and so on. The activation of sculptural ingredients (the making of a sculpture) occurs in spaces near and on the sculptural object, similar to the space of the viewer although not identical to it. This is especially true of sculpture constructed with elements of varying manufacture. Put simply, sculpture is layered, either as a structure or as an action, or both. Clearly paintings and certain types of drawing can be layered, but their layers tend to fold into an amalgam, as each layer is incorporated with the previous, forming a skin. As a viewer experiences a work of art, she may at certain moments reflect on the experience of the artist making the work. In painting or drawing, the artist is likely close to or right at the skin surface. In the case of sculpture the artist may also be at the surface or may be away from the surface. The working space of sculpture is, like sculpture itself, overtly volumetric, even when the sculpture appears to be flat. The viewer of painting may feel as though she could be in the space of the painter relative to the work, but the viewer of sculpture will have less certainty of that orientation. In this respect sculpture may be understood as distanced. Think of Giacometti's figures: they appear removed even when inspected close-up. The making marks of his sculptures are clearly personal, like a painter's brushstrokes, but the figures are still envisioned as though slightly beyond the plane of contact.

    Which takes us to Steven Careau's works on paper. (Perhaps "works on paper" is the kind of language that tries to deal with the mixed identity of sculpture, painting, and drawing. And perhaps this mixed identity originates in collage, a form with intellectual mischief built into it in the way it mixes disparate elements.) Careau's paper works are established as painting or drawing. He presents broadly inked gestures in romantic strokes that glide, rise, and fall onto the paper. I suspect that if he stopped there, his work would sustain our interest, but it clearly does not sustain his. Given the work as evidence, he is interested in something else in those strokes. I read the use of agricultural lime, another layer developed away from the surface and dusted onto it, as both an enhancement to and a barrier to the stroked surface—a distance maker.

    Notice how the spikey ends of brush marks are now a dark flame-edge around the pale inner cloud of lime dust. The stroke is a form, a thing, but a thing simultaneously fading even as it seems revealed. Our engagement with this body of work requires that we are attentive to its procedure and its materials. Notice how the dry powder absorbs the wet ink. An act of preservation? Does this application of lime hint at the preparation of the dead before the burial of their remains?

    Careau's tool-like sculptures suggest oblique harmonies. Although developed from a more rigid body language, these sculptures share a dynamic with the paper works as they find their equilibrium. Like the ink gestures that sink under the lime, the linear sculptures that make up the Silloné works slip into the gallery walls and out into the gallery space. They compress and stretch, touch and yield, pause and calculate themselves, and pause again, and pause completely. One may wonder about what they may do when they are not witnessed. Or maybe that is too fanciful; it is enough that their doing is implied.

    Art has over its long history been interested in its capacity to have a history, in a sense, to remember itself. That is one of the reasons why, for instance, artists were often invested in securing permanence in their objects. These works of graceful strokes and elegant movements are made to stop. They are gently solidified, as though memorialized. Typically memorials are created for people, or heroes even, and small or great events. In this work the gesture of a self is secured and presented as its own phantom, forever and never slipping from view.

    David Raymond
    McCoy Gallery, Merrimack College