Oscar Bronner | Figura Serpentinata

Oscar Bronner’s solo exhibition Figura Serpentinata takes the art historical motif that describes spiralling groups of figures as the impetus for a series of new cast aluminium sculptures. The sculptures’ abstract geometric forms recall organic life and bionic simulation, growth and chaos, with a mottled surface reminiscent of the finger painting of his earlier canvas works.

When the Laocoön group was dug up out of a garden in Rome in the 1500s, the swirling dynamism of the classical figures spurred Renaissance artists of the time to produce similarly alive and dynamic constellations of figures. One could say it set off a depiction of dynamism commensurate with the burgeoning modern era; scientific discovery, global expansion, the intensity of urban life, a DNA double helix, the flaneur in the swirl of galaxies.

How do we experience this dynamism, an upward swirl, the growth of organic life itself? There is the contra of the downward spiral, our neurotic anxieties for modernity’s misdirections. In between the nascent modern and now, there was Vladimir Tatlin’s famed mechanical serpentinata: The Monument to the Third International, the spiralling intensity of revolutionary collective action, dynamic change on a societal level. Perhaps not chaotic enough in its rendering.

But in speaking of the machine, the tool and bionic simulations, what comes to mind are the large screw paintings and drawings of Lee Lozano, which have recently been much discussed. Not heroic but critical, perhaps bitterly ironic at times, the Big Screw. There is still movement, bodily reference, energy itself, but caught in the inhuman power and cold aggression of determined actions. Bronner’s recent sculptures hark back to earlier paintings of his, which depict such serpentinata, organic forms spiralling upwards, but unlike the hard lines of Lozano’s screws these works are modulated by a finger-painted surface. The hard metallic surfaces of the new sculptures show a similar gestural hand work in the plaster before the casting process. An intimate and expressive softening of the forms, insisting on the presence of the artist but also the unstable, always already forming-ness of change.

Bronner’s forms also bring to mind letter forms, as abstracted arms and legs so often do, not a legible lexicon but an inference to meaning and sense making in their energetic limbs. For Marshall McLuhan, the great theorist of Techne, language itself is a tool, - perhaps the first and most important - that in its use fundamentally changed us. Language is also constantly evolving, pressing forward under the strain of the constant need to understand the ever ungraspable present.