Wilshire Center

Sculptor Max DeMoss finally hits his stride with fragmented classical figures and equestrian statues that leap and gambol through space. The forms are beautiful, yet eerily incomplete. Cast in bronze, the forms are piecemeal constructions rife with mold lines and missing chunks of mass. This cut-and-paste treatment gives them the spontaneous appearance of quick gesture drawings done in three dimensions.

As bodies break apart with the objectivity of a window dresser’s mannequin, De Moss plays with the mystique of the bronze-casting process. He deconstructs some of its physical properties by flaying open the human and animal forms so that light and space can unravel the solid core. Mass is debunked as a hollow shell, and form is just a skin of shape jerked hastily over emptiness. With all that openness, light increasingly becomes an animating force solidifying within the dark interior. (Wenger Gallery, 828 N. La Brea Ave., to Oct. 24.).