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Rhomboidal Plane (with Internal Free Region) in 4 Masses and 2 Scales
1976
Steel
Dimensions: 8 x 230 x 230 cm
Reference: ACF0518
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David Rabinowitch exemplifies the contemporary process of accessing thezero degree of sculpture, which links up with the tradition of the Constructivists and Suprematists, who first insisted on economy of resources and, of course, with artists like David Smith and the Minimalists. In this work there is an investigation of the physical conditions of art, but also its optical qualities. Rabinowitch's work in ”la Caixa” Collection of Contemporary Art is highly representative of his career and his structural concerns. It consists of four pieces of steel with a geometry we might call “dissymmetrical”, which mark out an empty space that cannot be described as “central”. In this powerful sculpture, he analyses the change in perception according to different points of view and signals a distant desire to reconcile those differences in a rational unity.
As we walk around the piece, we get the feeling of a metamorphosis of the linear design, as if those heavy realities had a touch of indescribable lightness. The subtle angling of the elements generates the different optical effects. In 1963, he defined the cone as “the index of the total rank of objects”, and developed numerous conic sections in his work (circles, ellipses, parabolas and hyperbolas). In a work in which the structure is crucial, there is also an extreme concern with the philosophical, as we can glean from the notes on Spinoza, which he began in 1963. Among them: “The attributes of God, physical and mental, are expressed in the two attributes of substance—thought and extension.” He is interested in transcendental vision, or rather Kant’s idea that universal knowledge must be linked to relative terms, since they both make up human experience. For this sculptor, the first Kantian critique is the channel, the operative link “with which he creates the initial foundation for artists who need to imagine a participation in the development of modern physics with regard to those efforts that are compressed on the rubric of Constructivism.”
In the face of abstract formalism, Rabinowitch makes clear his interest in geometry linked to metaphysics, heir to that Platonic vision of God the geometer. For him mathematics and geometry determine the art of approaching the truth. Sculpture unifies the exterior (horizontal) and the interior (vertical) and gives the feeling of a process of pulsation, a movement that has to do with our reflexive involvement in what is raw material. The rhomboidal structure he composes takes on a paradoxically monumental quality, since he radicalises the process of losing the pedestal and appropriates the ground, in the same way as Carl Andre, for example. Interested in understanding how things can be seen in their essence, he has created a work in non-hierarchical conditions, which Stephan von Wiese describes as “the anarchic occasion of experience.” Undoubtedly, this sculpture imposes both the idea of a marked out void—which could evolve reflexively in Heideggerian keys—and a power of gravity, corresponding to the fascination with weight we find in the works of Richard Serra. If on the one hand, in Rabinowitch's symbolic drift the shadow of death appears, that enormous tension, in his own words, “between the clarity of life and the simplicity of death”, on the other, the compositional structure, that geometrical adjustment of the four elements, calculated in many drawings, reveals that the reflexive potency frees us of cloudy melancholy or the feeling of the absurd.
