Charles Hecht: AMERICA in Steel
Jackie Mattera
Courtesy of the artist, Charles Hecht.
The American flag is one of the most easily recognizable, symbolically loaded icons in the world. There are few symbols that evoke as many feelings, from patriotic verve to impassioned rage. The polarity and intensity of these responses has only increased since September 11th, 2001. Today, it seems that to wear, display, wave, or hang an American flag can no longer be a casual gesture. Charles Hecht, whose latest art works consist of several flags installed together, stresses the fact that there is no political connotation implied in this work: "It’s just art," he says, "The idea is elementary."
A continuation of the 2002-2003 Hannah series that consisted of steel American flags that were influenced by Hecht’s nine-year-old granddaughter’s school project, Hecht’s recent exhibition at Broadway Gallery, "AMERICA," featured a new series of steel sculpture works. Hecht has created twelve sculptures, each of them representing an American flag. They were made from sheets of steel, all the same size of 13" by 24", and then painted them in the colors red and blue. The "white" is pure steel, since the color symbolizes purity. The stars consist of marbles of red, white and blue, blue and white or solid white. Steel and glass are the materials Hecht favors. The sculptures hang three to four inches off the wall. Nine flags hang as a square group, another three individually on the side walls. At first sight, the nine pieces in the group almost look like a Warhol-style series.
As Hecht has shown his sculptures throughout America, Germany, China and Spain, each of the exhibitions integrate the artist’s most recent surroundings. For example, at the preceding exhibition in Beijing, China, Hecht explored Chinese nationalism. In works that were bigger and bolder, where pieces expanded to over fourteen feet in width. Hecht played with the three-dimensionality of a flag, forging each so that there is an illusion of a light breeze making these immense and heavy structures actually wave in the wind. Some of the golden stars are assembled in a slight distance from their red background so that in addition to the wavy shapes, the flags explore the light and shadow play. These sculptures work especially well outdoors, utilizing the movements of the sun, to reflect and refract light on the steel surfaces. At Broadway Gallery, however, the works sparkled from the movement of the crowd, sending out an audacious, if "elementary" message of patriotism and glory.
