[1] 
[2] 
[3] 
[4][1] [2] [3] [4](1) "Wing-Arm Torso", bronze, 41 3/4 x 34 x 25",
1988.
(2) " Wing-Arm Woman", bronze, 36 1/2 x 52 1/2 x 17
1/2", 1992.
(3) "Torso with Springing Hip", bronze, 37 3/4 x 12
x 8 1/2", 1987/89.
(4) "Two Women Walking", bronze, 75 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 31",
1992.
(Lizardi/Harp Gallery, West Hollywood) The poet Robert Bly
has commented that in most walks of life outside of the arts,
excessive competition does not, in his words, "allow feeling
to come in." Sculptor Stephen De Staebler's work, on the
other hand, proceeds via inclusion, embracing, as it does, the
circle of paradox, and in so doing honors artistic and human wholeness.
For over thirty years, De Staebler, from his northern California
base, has been creating works of intense poetic beauty. He embodies
an art of synthesis, combining "classic" motifs of Bay
Area Figurative painting and Funk assemblage--fragment oriented
sculpture with allusions, echoes, assertions of figuration in
general, as it has "walked," almost literally, from
antiquity through the twentieth century.
Perhaps more than any other aes- thetic position or question,
modern art has struggled with the Keatsian dialectic of "truth
and beauty's" dilemma. On the one hand art must fearlessly
commit itself to the truth about the human condition. If, however,
that truth exposes man's ugly inhumanity to man, as well as each
individual's at times horrifying and private dance with darkness,
how can creative works expressive of such truths also be beautiful?
"Between extremes," wrote Yeats, "man runs his
course." Between extremes, as well, De Staebler's sculpture
declares it's worth.
Consider Yoke-Winged Man, one of his elegantly fragmented
bronze figures. It rises, balanced in its amputated mystery, off
its pedestal on a lone left leg. The left arm extends outward,
horizontal, wing-like to the ground. There is no right arm or
leg. They exist in non-existence. The left limbs, in other words,
balance nothing. This, like most of the artist's works, offers
an art history lesson in a glance, without (and here in lies the
magic) sacrificing its immediate and present emotion. Just as
the ancient Greeks adored, if not invented, an appreciation and
fascination for the rhythms of formal wholeness and balance in
art (as well as in other walks of life), the fragments of ancient
sculpture, as archeologists discovered them, came to express an
exquisite kind of complete statement in and of themselves. The
viewer's imagination fills in what time has carved away from a
work such as the Venus de Milo. De Staebler, in postmodern
fashion, appropriates images of ancient sculpture's bits and pieces
into works new in material but ancient in soul.
The personal, pedestrian insouciance of his figure's poses also
reflect the rich humanness also expressed in the work of Richard
Diebenkorn, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Manuel Neri, and other
Bay Area figurative artists. His method of gracing his figures
with a hand-painted (and extremely tender) patina suggests another
Bay Area imprint: The hand-painted metal sculpture of artists
such as Robert Hudson and Joseph Slusky.
A splendidly versatile artist, De Staebler shows other sculptures
that exhibit his penchant for abstraction, integrating as they
do, a figurative and often mythological element in one way or
another. In Inverted Portal, a spacious and simple rectangular
form balances on an upside down and, characteristically, charred
human head, which, in turn emerges out of a heap of bronze lava-like-looking
"rock." The entire piece lies on a broad bronze base.
Rounding out the exhibition De Staebler will show gestural monotypes
of figures that again blend a colorful and watery freshness with
a strong sense of structural integrity and emotional depth.
