Timely Monuments by Sue Taylor Extending the great tradition of modernist sculpture, Jon Krawczyk has adapted the medium of recalcitrant metal to his highly original process of discovery and formal invention. Among his heroes are Picasso, Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, Constantin Brancusi, and David Smith, but his sculptural achievements resemble theirs only in spirit. Barely a decade into his rapidly burgeoning career, he has moved from icy, brushed-aluminum and stainless-steel surfaces and lively geometries to the warm feeling of bronze, often incorporating more figurative references. Krawczyk’s engagement with his material is emphatically physical, producing objects that elicit similarly tactile responses from viewers. His sculptures are not cast but assembled; thus they are never editioned but always singular and unique. Starting as raw sheet metal, the bronze is carved with a plasma cutter, welded, hammered, ground down, sand blasted. It is a muscular, labor-intensive activity, which concludes with the alchemical transmutation of surfaces: using various acids and pigments, Krawczyk imbues his forms with sensuous patinas, carefully controlling their application to the degree possible while welcoming unpredictable, serendipitous, painterly effects. A tension between the geometric and the biomorphic is beautifully realized in Cross, a monumental, 14-foot sculpture Krawczyk created for a church in Palm Desert, California in 2005. The artist’s challenge was to replace for this congregation a century-old wooden cross, worm-eaten and windblown—but how to render the venerable artifact in obdurate metal and still retain a sense of its marvelous vitality? Krawczyk’s conception brilliantly conflates the rood itself and the sacrificial body. With its erect, rigid form and irregular, undulating surfaces, his stately cruciform is at once an abstract symbol and a figure, a traditional image of death that is paradoxically organic and alive. With its graceful upward- and outward-sweeping lines, moreover, it seems to rise and float, despite its ponderous weight, embodying possibilities of spirituality and redemption. The seven-foot Walking Man (2002) rehearses an elemental theme familiar from Rodin and Giacometti, but with a sense of whimsy rather than existential loneliness and in an entirely contemporary vocabulary. Here is a human body reduced to eight or nine parts in five or six colors—head, neck, arms, chest, abdomen, and legs, each a distinct volume with its own eccentric shape. The dynamic interrelationship of these parts reminds us of critic Michael Fried’s claim that the premier interest of modernist sculpture is in the syntax, “the mutual inflection of one element by another.”1 Thus in Krawczyk’s Apache Sun (2002), where the components are not abstracted body parts but pure cubic forms, trapezoids and wedges, formal vivacity is achieved in the energetic relation of part to part and part to whole. But there’s more: Krawczyk enlists shadow and space as well as color in his composition, and the warm-brown and cool-blue patinas echo the earth and sky of the American Southwest poetically invoked in the work’s title. Eschewing detail for generalized form, Krawczyk evokes an age-old sculptural tradition in the formidable Sentry (2002). The imposing, forward thrusting monument, tense and ready on its three massive legs, joins a long lineage of guardian figures, typically associated with architecture (palaces, fortresses, and tombs), but here independent and free standing. Conceived before the violent events of 2001, Krawczyk’s powerful, looming sculpture nevertheless conveys a sense of watchfulness and resolve in striking concordance with a widespread feeling of a nation on the alert. Not conscious of these specific associations—Krawczyk approaches all his projects without preconceived ideas about subject matter—the artist still imparts a profound topicality to his works. What could be more ancient and timeless than the female body rendered in sculpture, and yet Stoic Conviction Tomorrow (2004) is pertinent today. The six-foot figure, consisting essentially of head and torso, seems rooted in the earth on which it stands, grounded as a tree or some enduring, columnar geological formation. In the patinated vertical striations that play across its surface, however, we may imagine an allusion to classical drapery and thus to the myriad personifications throughout history of abstract virtues in art. Indeed, Krawczyk’s own comparison of this sculptural goddess to the Statue of Liberty suggests that such an interpretation might not be objectionable to him. Although his passionate preoccupations are workmanly and formal—he speaks of positive and negative shapes, volume and space, concealing and revealing, building sculptures for the sheer love of building—the meaning of his art embraces all that and much more. 1. See Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 137-38. Fried had in mind the sculpture of David Smith and especially Tony Caro: “Everything in Caro’s art that is worth looking at,” he insisted, “is in its syntax.” Sue Taylor is a corresponding editor for Art in America and associate professor of art history at Portland State University, Oregon.