ART REVIEWS : Sculptures Track Cycles of Nature

Robert Gero’s installation finds fecundity at the root of entropy. Out of the walls and floor of the American Gallery, he has cut five thin seven-foot strips, which he has filled with organic materials.

Although his minimalist-derived sculptures have almost no mass, they have the presence of ancient icons to mysterious alchemical rituals. Almost not there but strangely potent, they offer a low-tech version of inclusive, cyclical movement.

Two L-shaped incisions divide the gallery in half. Their upright segments have been packed with seeds of wheat and capped with triangles of lead. Their horizontal portions form shallow channels in the floor that almost join at the room’s center. Filled with water, silt and mud, these little geometric lakes are beginning to sprout wheat as the seeds from the walls fall into them.

Gero upsets the mirror-like perfection of these sculptures by balancing them against another wall cutout (filled with salt, sugar and carbon) and a small floor piece whose pyramidal form seems to have split in half--its iron side’s soft, powdery rust set next to the pale yellow iridescence of its sulfur half.

His installation opens the gallery’s closed geometry to nature’s ongoing cycles. Gero’s art conjoins minimalism’s pristine forms with architecture, and locates both within biological processes of decay and rebirth. American Gallery, 712 Traction Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 687-0248 . Exhibit ends today.