Lisa Collodoro welcomes sculptors Josh Urso and Josef Zutelgle to Casa Colombo for a show that pairs an industrial aesthetic with an organic one.
It is unlikely that Josh Urso means to give us a metaphor for life in Jersey City. His exercises in industrial kintsugi might be motivated by aesthetic pleasures alone: how raw concrete looks when it cleaves and how brightly-colored paint sings on a smooth gray background like letters stenciled on asphalt. Urso could simply be fascinated by the properties of the material he’s using, and the way in which cracks twist through concrete with the unpredictability of rivers. Even after it’s fractured, it stays firm and hefty; no matter how rudely you treat it, concrete still means business. Perhaps Urso, susceptible as we all are to the American idea of endurance under stress, sees his medium as commendably tough stuff.
But artists, if you’ll pardon the expression, work where God places them. Josh Urso sculpts in place where there happens to be a lot of concrete. As all concrete breaks up eventually, nobody here has to go searching for cracks in the pavement. They’re wherever we look. When we walk under the Turnpike Extension, we see those cracks in the pylons and stanchions, and we don’t run for our lives. We assume this is gravity and weight doing its work, and that our town can stand up to a few hits.
In his process, Urso is both fabricator and destroyer, crack-spinner and beautifier, stacking concrete blocks, shattering them with hammers, highlighting the fissures with a tickle of pigment, gilding the cinderblock. If you believe in the charm and the excitement of the built environment — if you’re an urbanist — Urso’s faith in the poetic glory of its fundament and his glorification of its faults will excite you. At his shows, crowd-pleasing drama is practically guaranteed. Everybody likes a good smashup. When the things we smash turn out to be just as beautiful after they’re broken, we see that as a triumph of resilience. We might agree, enthusiastically, that the damage deserves to be anointed with paint.
“Air & Earth,” which’ll be on view at Casa Colombo (380 Monmouth St.) until February 22, finds Urso in an assured mood. He knows how to do this: how to bust up slabs, pin them together, call careful attention to the empty places where the pulverized concrete is gone, and hang the whole thing on the wall or stand it on a pedestal and let it talk to the viewer. He knows how to allude to the fragility of the built environment, and he knows how to reassure us about its persistence, too.
Some of the pieces in the show are among the friendliest that the sculptor has ever assembled, including a stack of five chopped-up cinderblocks with Smurf-blue edges that looks, from a distance, like a brutalist cartoon character. A tower of broken bricks with pockmarks and striations brought alive with sky blue paint coaxes elegance and lightness out of a material not known for either quality. Urso’s action figures are Transformers made from alterations in the neighborhoods around us, and they do serve to make the city, and the city’s components, powerful and even noble.
But the piece this show will be remembered for is “Fractured Cube,” a poetic little toy-box of concrete with a gash in its top, diagonal cracks running down every face, and poured surfaces everywhere it hasn’t been weathered. Was some sort of industrial embryo gestated in there, and did its growth shatter the egg-smooth walls of the cube? Or are we witnessing the prelude to a collapse?
Probably neither. Dynamic as they are, Urso’s pieces are all pretty comfortable. His stacks don’t look like they’re about to topple. Like the cracks on the Newark Avenue sidewalk, Urso’s fissures could have been there from antiquity, or the New Deal. It’s arguable that Urso’s sculptures would look more imperiled if he hadn’t broken them, and that the fractures in the slabs enhance the feeling of strength. As if to underscore the precariousness, a slab of shattered concrete hangs on the wall about the cube at a dangerous diagonal. Isn’t that infrastructure: slabs atop slabs, domino arrays of tall concrete buildings and fat concrete bunkers, all showing signs of age, but with nothing giving way.
Curator Lisa Collodoro has paired Urso with another sculptor with a feel for architecture: Josef Zutelgte, a sculptor born in Germany but most frequently shown in the galleries of New York City. His works is varied and often colorful, but he’s brought his paler stuff to our side of the river to harmonize with Urso’s concrete greys. Urso’s material doesn’t bend; Zutelgte’s sculpture is all bends. Next to Urso’s work, Zutelgte’s surfaces feel like a rejection of the rigidity of concrete construction. Instead, he shares with the Jersey sculptor Robert Lach a destabilizing knack for making objects that look like they were grown in a swamp, or knitted together by marsh birds, or assembled like wax scales from insect abdomens.
Some of these pieces are as notable for the shadows they cast as they are for their composition. One piece — squatting in the middle of the gallery like a scrub patch of goldenrod — is a bale of oar-like reeds, and it throws an arachnid tangle of lines on the wooden floor. Another looks like a cross between a beehive and an oversized wedding cake with button-sized apertures, big enough for a weevil to hang out in, in a skin curved and smoothed like fondant. If Urso’s work tells us that everything we make from concrete will buckle and shatter, and we’ll love and mend it anyway, Zutelgte’s sculpture whispers that that not made by human hands will weather the coming storm just fine, and it hardly matters to its inhabitant whether we love or hate it at all.
(“Air & Earth” will be on view at Casa Colombo until February 22. That’s Wednesdays and Thursdays from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. and Saturdays from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. It’s a free show.)