ART REVIEW : Sculptures With the Presence of Sketches

Guy Dill’s steel sculptures falter because they are too much like paintings. Made up of three or four components that are uniformly covered with matte black paint, his barely 3-D realizations of lines, arcs, triangles, ellipses, semi-circles and discs rarely depart from the shallow plane defined by a two-dimensional image. Only one of his slightly larger than human scale constructions at Jan Turner Gallery begins to approach a physically engaging composition.

Dill’s bigger-than-monumental, potentially industrial-strength sculptures have the presence of diminutive sketches. They lack not only the restless, relentless energy that animated the drawn studies of the Russian Constructivists from the teens and ‘20s, but are also missing the off-balanced illusionism of David Smith’s shiny constructions from the ‘50s and the syncopated rhythms of Anthony Caro’s gravity-defying, fragmentary arrangements from the ‘60s.

Dill’s flat-footed demonstrations of simple formal principles, like balance and composition, must be measured against these more talented progenitors because his sculptures try to cash in on their impressive pedigree.

One of Dill’s sculptures in the gallery’s back room, however, breaks free of the picture plane that constricts and diminishes the rest of his work. More like a corkscrew than a flat image, its energy builds as it circles through space. This body-size work suggests that Dill many soon acknowledge the fact that his other sculptures inhabit three dimensions, and begin to explore the formal possibilities this simple truth implies.

Jan Turner Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., (310) 271-4453, through Sept. 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.