Pith

Charlie Engelman's sculptures arise from a spirit of plastic freedom, nourished by the artist's dedicated and roaming research and his immersion in the language of objects. In Pith, Engelman's first solo exhibition at Château Shatto, he draws a line between materials that are superficially incongruent, yet connected by their belonging to the visible and invisible phenomena of California. Pith is the first occasion that Engelman is publicly exhibiting sculptures made from salvaged old growth redwood, the product of trees that lived for many centuries. The artist sculpts solid forms, shaping rough lumber with tools that decrease in size and intimacy as he gets closer to the final form. These are presented on top of scrupulously realized bases that emulate Auguste Rodin's sculpture stands of the late nineteenth century. The two distinct processes draw out the varied behaviors of the wood and its different historical applications, with the bases speaking to refined sculptural and technical histories and the forms that sit atop them encouraging the more expressive conduct of the wood, in which it heaves, distends and releases a latent internal pressure. Engelman's forms crafted from dense urethane foam arise from the abundant prospects of eliciting a static shape out of a material blank. For Pith, the artist takes his most evident formal prompts from 19th and early 20th century Art Deco mausoleums. Lifting from a tradition of object making that inherently addresses time, scale and how form recognizes a body's absence, these sculptures assume the planarity and symmetrical simplicity of their source style but with tonal distortion. The occasional application of flocking on these surfaces redirects towards traditions of sculpture and commercial displays that rely on seductive conventions emphasizing the haptic invocations of their surface. Engelman treats foam with a versatility that the material is already accustomed to in its application to industrial products, across automobiles, aerospace craft, furniture, and motion pictures props and sets. All of these industries are vigorously productive in Engelman's native California, a region that connects his experience to that of Light and Space artists. Beyond questions of what is shared formally and superficially in this geography, Engelman is attuned to the air and one's relationship to the particles the air carries. California's air not only extends a visual filter to sunsets and atmospheric conditions here, but literally inhabits the cavities of Engelman's foam and penetrates the redwood as it breathes open. There is a pair of objects in Pith realized using mold-making processes. In these works, Engelman casts wax duplicates of broomsticks and other wooden handles, allowing the wax repetitions to soften in Los Angeles' warm days and harden during brisk nights, using the rhythm of temperature to the material's advantage. The floor-bound figure—painted and illusionistically held together by ‘zip ties'—yields to the anthropomorphic tendency that relates people to the world of objects with an implicated curiosity. Engelman's approach to materials shares a similar spirit to his relationship to formal histories, in that there is both a succumbing and an overriding in the activity of making. Though stylistic, art historical and commercial histories emanate from his sculptures, these generate as echoes within the practice, rather than a foundation for understanding. Charlie Engelman (b. 1988, Los Angeles, CA) received a Master of Fine Arts from ArtCenter College of Design, Los Angeles. Select group exhibitions include Karma, New York; Château Shatto, Los Angeles; Spy Projects, Los Angeles; Gattopardo, Los Angeles; Crickets, Los Angeles; and Nan Rae Gallery, Burbank. Pith is his first solo exhibition with the gallery.

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