ART REVIEW : Painterly Sculptures, Illusionism by Kapoor

It might seem unproductive to wonder, midway through the exhibition, why the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art chose to organize a show of recent sculpture by Anish Kapoor. This is the kind of question for which no unassailable answer can finally be offered.

However, that the question pushes its way into your head anyhow signals a fundamental weakness to this work. Kapoor’s admittedly thoughtful and often sensual sculpture touches a variety of familiar bases. Finally, though, it’s far from persuasive.

Lots of rational reasons could be advanced for this newly opened show, which presents nine sculptures made since 1989. At 37, the Bombay-born, London-educated and -based artist has seen his career travel steadily on an upward trajectory.

Kapoor has been a fixture on the international exhibition circuit for the past decade, ever since his participation in the 1982 Aperto --the “open” invitational for younger artists at the Venice Biennale. Eight years later, his brightly pigmented sculpture had moved from the margin to the center, with a prestigious spot representing Britain in that country’s national pavilion at the 1990 Biennale. For that outing, London’s Tate Gallery last fall awarded him the Turner Prize, given for the outstanding exhibition in the previous year by a British artist younger than 50.

Despite such credentials, Kapoor’s sculpture has been seen only rarely and in isolated examples in the United States--mostly in a few New York gallery shows, and almost never on the West Coast. The San Diego survey, which will travel to Des Moines, Iowa, and the Canadian cities of Ottawa and Toronto during the next two years, fills a gap. It also provides an update and a fragment of context: The museum has shown the work of a number of other British sculptors in recent years, including Tony Cragg, Richard Long, Eric Snell and Bill Woodrow; and not long ago it acquired a 1989 work by Kapoor for its permanent collection.

Called “The Healing of St. Thomas,” the museum’s sculpture is a wound-like gash, a foot long or more, cut high up in a white wall; the interior has been coated with bright crimson pigment. Despite its small scale, it says a lot about what Kapoor is up to.

Where sculpture traditionally has been an art of mass, this sculptor is more concerned with the painter’s realm of space--be it the void that constitutes “The Healing of St. Thomas;” the sparse, white room housing a bright-red pillar in a new, site-specific installation titled “Endless Column;” the carved interiors of two blocks of sandstone and one of marble in three free-standing sculptures from 1991; or the literal hole-in-the-ground that makes up “The Earth,” a circle sawed and removed from the gallery floor that, through means we’ll get to in a moment, seems to have created a terrifying bottomless pit in the heart of the museum.

Kapoor’s painterly interest in space also explains his frequent use of powdered pigments as a surface coating for his sculpture, especially alizarin crimson and Prussian blue, but here including a rich, light-absorbent black. (He sometimes uses other hues as well, but none are in this show.) The pigments are typically mixed with turpentine and painted onto the sculptural form; the liquid evaporates, leaving behind an intense residue of lush, vivid color with no telltale brush marks.

As in the case of “Angel” (1990), which consists of eight large and mostly horizontal slabs of blue-pigmented sandstone dispersed throughout a room, the velvety color does not look applied so much as oddly intrinsic to the form.

These transformative unions are further implied in the central metaphor of “The Healing of St. Thomas,” which of course refers to the doubter who would not believe in the Resurrection until Jesus showed him his wounds and invited Thomas to touch them. The bright-red gash in the clean white wall of a contemporary art museum has decidedly non-sectarian, but nonetheless spiritual, implications. For Kapoor, sculpture seems a healing art in a world of modern doubt.

Secularized versions of traditional religious iconography are recurrent in his work. The “St. Thomas” and “Angel” sculptures are obvious examples. The big, untitled, tripartite wall-sculpture composed of lush blue and black hemispheres, each more than 8 feet in diameter, is a more subtle one.

Each form recalls the architectural “dome of heaven” common to religious buildings, albeit here tipped on its side. When you stand close to any of the hemispheres, sound is trapped, absorbed and bounced around inside, creating the peculiar illusion that the noise is actually rattling around inside your cranium.

Pregnancy and the womb are also regular images, frequently in sculptures that have a human scale. “In the Presence of Form” (1991) is a swollen mound secreted within a hollowed-out block of sandstone (think of centuries-old Buddhist carvings in sandstone caves), while a similar protuberance grows directly from a gallery wall in the bluntly titled installation “When I am Pregnant” (1992).

Elsewhere, a gray oval shape on the flat side of a white marble block slowly becomes dimensional as you approach the untitled sculpture; finally, the shape reveals itself to be a deep ovoid form carved within the rock. As with the pregnant shapes, a mysterious imminence is its subject.

The surprise transformation from flat oval shape to full ovoid form shows how illusionism often plays a pivotal role in Kapoor’s sculpture. Illusionism usually creates a conflict between perceptual experience and conceptual knowledge. When it works in Kapoor’s art, the conflict is--quite literally--immaterial.

“The Earth” is the strongest work in the show. Its convincing illusion of a bottomless pit is created by a hemisphere, coated with light-sucking black pigment, placed beneath the circular hole in the floor. The hole can’t be more than 2 feet in diameter, but neither can you see the bottom. It feels like a terrible, deathly maw that might swallow you whole.

When the illusion doesn’t work, as in the red “Endless Column,” the sculptural bubble bursts. Your mind knows that Kapoor intends the crimson “column-of-fire” to appear as if it has magically burst through the white room, uniting with eternity this mundane fragment of space and time. Your eye, however, merely sees a post covered with red pigment, which has also been carefully splashed and wiped on the ceiling and the floor. In the face of lofty spiritual ambitions, such clumsy trickery is didactic and silly.

Kapoor’s simplified, geometric forms are decidedly minimal (with a small m ), but his sculpture seeks to restore an elemental quality that capital-M Minimalist sculpture effectively banished. When Minimalist artists made unprecedented sculptures whose interior spaces and exterior forms flowed seamlessly from one another, rather like the workings of a Mobius strip, they wanted to upend a traditional presumption. The sharp division between a profane world that loomed outside a supposedly spiritual core lurking inside abstract art was shown to be a false duality.

By contrast, reactionary mourning for the resulting loss of faith is suggested by carving St. Thomas’ wound in the museum’s wall or digging a bottomless pit at the institution’s center.

Apparently, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art shares the fantasy. There is as yet no exhibition catalogue (one is expected in a month or two), although the show fills the entire museum and is scheduled to remain on view for an unusually lengthy run of four months. But, a wall text mounted at the entrance forthrightly declares: “Anish Kapoor is perhaps the most original of a group of British sculptors who came to prominence in the 1980s.”

The claim, qualified by perhaps or not, seems utterly insupportable, as anyone previously familiar with the sculpture of Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon knows well. It turns out the exhibition does nothing to persuade one otherwise.

San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla, (619) 454-3541, to May 31. Closed Mondays.