A Little Goes a Long Way – E.K. Clark

Lars Fisk’s second solo show at Taxter and Spengemann, a laconic presentation, consists of just three pieces but like a young gladiator just beginning to flex his muscles, he delivers a powerful punch. Trashcan is the most arresting piece here. What looks like a life-sized slightly dented garbage pail turns out to be meticulously carved from Vermont Imperial Danby marble.

A Little Goes a Long Way

E.K. Clark

 

 

 

Lars Fisk’s second solo show at Taxter and Spengemann, a laconic presentation, consists of just three pieces but like a young gladiator just beginning to flex his muscles, he delivers a powerful punch. Trashcan is the most arresting piece here. What looks like a life-sized slightly dented garbage pail turns out to be meticulously carved from Vermont Imperial Danby marble. The choice of marble as material which throughout art history served as the indicator of the timeless and heroic is a brilliant conceit.

In his playful way, Lars Fisk interrogates his place as an artist in the context of history and the shifting vagaries of fashion. He toys with our perceptions. For vanguard artists living in a throwaway McDonalds world, marble is associated with the past, Greek temples, Michelangelo and Platonic values that we can no longer ascribe to. In a global, capitalist, consumerist society, we have more garbage than we know what to do with so that the marble trashcan is doubly ironic.

Dust and marble chips fill the top of Trashcan memorializing, as it were, the process of its carving. In Garden Folly (2003-06), Fisk plays with scale and artifice setting garishly painted bricks against the tiny plastic flowers that seem to spring up out of this unlikely environment. This piece which measures only 12" x 12" x 8" feels totally monumental. Finally, in Mr. Boxwood (2005), Fisk indulges in an orgy of what might be termed constructivist kitsch pilling an array of materials: oil paint, rubber mulch, Double Bubble bubble gum and artificial plants on board. Surprisingly, it all seems to work, in a funky sort of way. To present so few and such diverse pieces in a solo exhibition is a daring strategy. It whets the appetite for what will come next and how the artist will develop his ideas.