ART REVIEWS

Shimmering Masses: With each passing year, John Chamberlain’s monolithic sculptures made from crumpled, bent and twisted segments of painted, chromium-plated and stainless steel are looking less and less like mangled fragments taken from automobile wrecks, and more and more like intangible bursts of color or weightless cascades of reflected light.

Some of the transformations in his abstract sculptures can be explained by the fact that cars aren’t very often made these days from solid sheets of steel, nor adorned with sexy streamlined bumpers forged from chrome. That fiberglass, plastic and tin have replaced these heavier metals, however, should suggest that Chamberlain’s artworks have a memorializing, even eulogistic presence.

Nothing could be further from the truth. His free-standing and wall-mounted sculptures at Daniel Weinberg Gallery defy gravity and deny such sentimental trips down memory lane. Chamberlain’s sculptures are so insistently of the present that they do not even refer back to the undoubtedly laborious process of their construction.

Although Chamberlain’s work began receiving attention at a moment in American art history when this expressive, self-centered model dominated, his recent sculptures make clear that his art was never concerned to articulate any kind of existential dread, Sturm und Drang Angst, or otherwise inexpressible authenticity.

Chamberlain’s sculptures are superficial in an American sense of staking their identity entirely in the realm of the visible. They are unapologetically decorative. They are beautiful with a vengeance. They make physical the sense that any narrative significance grafted onto them only detracts from what is already there.

Chamberlain’s most recent works seem to be wholly manifest in an instant, as if they just happened. This is, of course, an illusion, the result of difficult-to-achieve compositions that allow innumerable, fragmentary surfaces to be seen as unified wholes.

He has mastered an eccentric form of sculpture he invented in the ‘50s and has continued to refine up to the present.

* Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 2032 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-0180, through March 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.