Sculpture is a big interest of mine, especially contemporary abstract sculpture. And we all have our personal favorites. Tony Cragg, Anish Kapoor, Isamu Noguchi, Anthony Caro, Richard Serra come to my mind. These sculptors all create elemental compositions, usually with powerfully imposing and often monumental presences. The distinctive styles of these modern abstract sculptors make them very recognizable as well.
All of these contemporary abstract sculptors push their elemental forms to maximum potential. The works of these abstract sculptors often solves the needs of public institutions, museums and corporations for megalithic or powerfully controlled forms and rhythms. The sculptures of these contemporary artists tend to uniformity in surface texture, color, dimension, movement. Their lack of complexity is a strength in the impersonal world of the modern city, the modern corporation, the modern viewer.
But with any singular power there is an attendant weakness that is revealed in varying circumstances, and modern viewers also need feelings, ideas and words about an art that can be fully experienced. Those feelings, ideas and words can be shared with other viewers. So, how does Peter Reginato figure into this situation? Really very well. First of all Peter Reginato does not need an airplane hangar sized space to get his message across. He’s not tied to perfect bilateral or radial symmetry to relate to space and form. His surfaces are undulating and often multichromatic. His work is not so monumental that it cannot be approached, or owned, or shared.
The abstract forms that Peter Reginato renders reach out to viewers, but not as ambiguous, solitary or preoccupied inhabitants. Reginato’s works reach out as generous, communicating and engaging fellows – maybe exhibitionistic, maybe playful. These sculptures are energized, some with inquisitive energy, some with joyful energy. Even in the cold medium of stainless steel, Reginato brings about a nobility that demonstrates the spirit at work and play. His groupings of forms bring up associations of interaction, communication, possibility.
And let’s talk about color. Yes, I know Kapoor has moments of sheer genius with his monochromic works. And all of these artists understand surface, patina or corrosive textures. But Reginato really relates to color – primary, dazzling, vibrating. Peter Reginato’s painted steel sculptures are sometimes painted in one predominant color – just look at the photos, but then at just the very best point of visual movement in the composition comes a contrasting color, or even a polka dot pattern, to punctuate the visual field.
For his many-colored painted steel sculptures Reginato finds color combinations that impact the viewer over and over again in each different sculpture. Those colored areas are just as balanced and counterbalanced as his forms in their dynamic relationships to one another.
Reginato is often compared to Alexander Calder of classic mobile and stabile fame, but Reginato has more variety of color and compositional movement in his forms. In fact viewers may pick up a carnival spirit or a youthful spontaneity in many of Reginato’s works. It is an art of interaction, sensuality, expressivity. For abstract expressionism this sculpture is a vital breath of life and ranges from the humorous to the livid to the moody – but always open and available. Reginato’s work is a nonobjective sculpture form that has no fear of spontaneous question and answer. It’s immediacy is it’s real power – nothing hidden of it’s impulse and action.
For the viewers, curators and magnates of public and corporate art who long for the quiet power of an elementally formed monument that signifies stolid determination or immovable power and mass, or the variance of form of one or two pipe joints or of a singular symmetry – Peter Reginato does not figure. As a contemporary abstract sculptor who uses form and color in space to truly interact with his contemporaries – and future generations, about spontaneity and optimistic possibility, Peter Reginato figures wonderfully.
- Giselle Borzov
