jimmy

Jimmy Rix facade BBA Gallery, 14 August - 7 September

The recently closed Robert Klippel retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales led many people to conclude that he is one of the best sculptors of the twentieth century. As Geoffrey Legge, one of Klippel's longtime dealers reflected, there will surely not be a better sculpture exhibition mounted anywhere in the world this year.

It can be difficult to extract a lesson from the work of an artist as accomplished as Klippel. His sculptures are complete. They do not tolerate being pulled apart. But there is one conclusion that can easily be drawn from Klippel's example, and arguably from any major artist: that visual form offers infinite scope for creative exploration; that the developmental path of the artist who relates intelligently to the world of form need never go astray or reach an end. As Henri Focillon put it in the 1930s: "the life of forms is renewed over and over again...far from evolving according to fixed postulates, constantly and universally intelligible, it creates various new geometries even at the heart of geometry itself. Indeed, the life of forms is never at a loss to create any matter, any substance whatsoever of which it stands in need."(1) Focillon attributed to form a life of its own, and on walking through room after room of such varied and adventurous sculptures one could certainly believe that Klippel's formal play issued from a deeper, more powerful source than his own conscious will.

But formal play is not an end unto itself. Art reflects back on lived experience, and in Klippel's case the machine parts from which his strangely organic structures were wrought allowed him to express a simple but significant response to life in his time. "I seek the interrelationship of the cogwheel and the bud", Klippel said. In other words, his work was a response to the very human plight of sensing one's origin in the natural world, but at the same time feeling the impulse to invent and build another reality. And as so many of Klippel's sculptures showed, when the 'other reality' in question is art it often overlaps with nature, that ultimate and inexhaustible repository of forms.

It was a pleasure to go from the Klippel retrospective to facade, the solo exhibition of Jimmy Rix, a young sculptor whose formal universe has entered its first moment of balance. Rix has been producing sculpture for less than five years and this exhibition included several different kinds of work, suggesting that he has not yet settled on a certain path. But happily, most of the pieces in the exhibition belonged to the more sophisticated strain of his work.

The sculptures to which I refer, rarely larger than fifty centimetres in any dimension, appear from a distance to be bronzes, elegant abstractions that recall the shapes and rhythms of modernism. Their varied and unconventional sense of balance suggests that Rix has been riding a similar wave of creativity to that which Klippel routinely enjoyed. But on closer approach they turn out to be something else altogether. Built from parts of plastic toys (guns, train sets, Tonka trucks etc.) and painted to look like bronze, Rix's sculptures are imposters, at once concealing and taking advantage of the toyland identities of their constituent parts. Robocop's grounding form is a fat-tyred wheel. Atop it the upright shaft of a gun leads elegantly to a trigger and handle that invite action only to frustrate it, for this gun points directly to the ground, its muzzle lost amid axles and clutter. Navigate presents another artful mishmash of form and function, its steering wheel and gun sights crying out for movement but going nowhere. That these playful reconfigurations are achieved with such a refined sculptural sensibility is the success of the best works in facade.

Rix's other styles of work were represented by a trio of neo-expressionist helmets destined for stone-age heads, and some circus-style shooting galleries with titles referring to current social issues (W.A Bikie Wars, The United Prozac States of America). The former works are cliched, and the social commentary of the latter is achieved in a less laboured manner in the toy-based sculptures described above. But I wait to see whether Rix does pursue this more overt form of comment, and whether he will bring to it the formal and conceptual sophistication of his best work.

1. Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, Zone Books, New York, 1992, p.94.

-Ernest Foster