ART REVIEW : Horn Tests Her Mettle

Picture a drop of water tumbling in gravity free space, trying to resolve itself into a perfect sphere. Now imagine that form caught and cast somehow in solid, bluish stainless steel and you’ll have at least something of the impossible, pragmatic beauty in Roni Horn’s sensuous “Asphere VII” sculptural installation at MOCA’s Temporary Contemporary (to July 22). It’s the first of five separate installations, each devoted to isolating and examining metallic “substance.”

Horn’s art is about as empirical an experience of metals as you can get without actually working the stuff yourself. She achieves that kind of intimacy by working with mass. Not huge quantities, just solid forms. Each object she creates is solid and, with her starkly minimalist sensibility that quickly translates into sculptural forms, dependent, or at least indebted, to the stuff of which they are made.

Gold, that exquisitely ductile element, is squeezed as flat as a sheet of paper, then laid out like a picnic blanket on the floor of the gallery in “Forms From the Gold Field.” Only pure gold could take that much pressing and remain solid. One whole side curls up slightly as if a wind is turning it back while yellowish light, caught in the long gold channel, radiates impossible brightness from under the lip.

If Horn’s materials are always straightforward, her objects are not. “Thicket No. 2” consists of two flat rectangular slabs of matte-finished aluminum that keep disappearing visually into the pale gray floor. Along one side of the slabs are thick bars of irregularly placed bright chartreuse epoxy resin that keep the things from fading away altogether. Seen from the top, the lines create a kind of stunted bar code, but from the side the “bars” resolve into the word tiger spelled out in flaming green letters. Poetic words gain real substance and mass.

Many of the objects Horn isolates in her starkly minimalist installations have an industrial quality because the artist exploits standard manufacturing techniques. Surfaces are given standard mill finishes, duplicate forms are made as identical as mechanically possible. This reference to indistinguishable mass production is then sabotaged by the separation of one from another so they must each be regarded individually.

Clearly, Horn is working hard at making the most elemental things obvious. And if the work was one jot less visually alluring, those observations would seem as unintelligible as mumblings by a preoccupied physicist. But despite the demands that this kind of pared-down, intellectual aesthetic puts on the viewer, the pieces resonate with a stunning clarity. What we know about each is what we see. Surprisingly, what we see is simply being itself and it’s beautiful.