What People Are Saying

Sculpture Magazine

The issue for Robert Meyer is juncture, and its opposite. How the dynamics of torque can deform a whole into halves, with the point of their rupture crumpling under pressure. How sedimentary blocks express themselves in tectonic sheering, dividing themselves in the quaking rift. How sculptural forms are presences and also evidence of the act of their own formation.

All of Meyer’s works on display at the Enterprise Corporate Park set up a dialogue between parts and wholes, masses and volumes, surfaces and their scars. These sculptures are largely additive in character—cast forms in plaster and bronze. Even when he works in clay, Meyer handles it in sedimentary fashion, carving it as erosion—or glacial ice—might do.

These are works of graphic purity and tactile richness at the same time. The majority beg to be set against a sky or a panoramic wall, rising clean and poised from any angle, beautiful in their ﬁssures and silhouettes. They also beg for touch, playing materials and patinas elegantly, setting one surface against another, orchestrating color, texture, and ﬁnish in a play of light.

With Zen-like simplicity, Meyer limits his elements to prime numbers—one, two, and three—stacking them (like Brancusi) or sidling them past one another as the viewer shifts positions (like Barbara Hepworth). In a number of these works, a small sphere serves as a foil for a courser “landscape”—the orb’s perfect, polished skin a ﬁgurative element against angular, cliff-like blocks. In some, the orb lies at the foot of the larger forms, as if after a fall; in others, it wedges precariously between the yawning lips of a crevasse.

In still others, the sphere is nested in a niche, or huddled under an overhang. In 2 Forms w/Sphere no.2, it gains the narrowest toehold of a ledge—its back against a narrow rectangular slab that rises like a stele, rent down the center. The play on architectonic form here—pylon and stele—stacks planer silhouettes, rotating them ever so slightly on a vertical axis. From each of its cardinal points, this is a form that vacillates between wide and narrow, narrow and wide. The effect is at once geometric and organic, but also surprisingly hieroglyphic: the clarity of contour, from every point of view, dominates the reading of the form.

Often, Meyer’s sculptures take on a kind of glacial character, acting out the great, patient movements of elemental ebb and ﬂow. They split and pivot in geological pirouettes; they balance precariously “on point”—frozen in impossible attitudes of animate deﬁance of gravity. Certain of these slabs split and slide apart. Others are seemingly abraded with the relentless movement of ice.

As a young man, surprisingly enough, Meyer made a career in graphic design. As a mature artist, he moves in three-dimensional worlds, working at both intimate and monumental scale, exploiting not only the visual tensions between positive and negative shapes—of shape to color to texture—but also the nature of material itself. As much as his work “discovers” afﬁnities to nature, to architecture, to symbol, and to narrative, its most persuasive attribute is its capacity for touch. These may be images suspended in a dance of form and void, satisfying to the objective eye and the aesthetic soul, but their strongest empathy is with the viewer’s skin— informed by the way the body“reads” other forms and scopes their relation to the landscape.

Patricia Rossoff

New Haven Register

Robert Meyer’s abstract sculptures possess an irresistible appeal and approachability. The strength and simplicity of form, the elegant orchestration of balance and the subtle variations of surface make for a group of impressive works to which one instinctively responds.

Made variously of bronze, steel, marble and mixed media, these evocative works, on view at the Greene Art Gallery, convey a presence that is at once physical and cerebral, intimate and monumental, forceful and whimsical, organic and geometric, accessible and mysterious. Conﬁgured at various angles and juxtapositions in tones reminiscent of nature’s palette, the simple reductive shapes, spheres, planes and natural forms have a tactile quality and rhythmic ﬂow that invite the viewer to touch and encircle them. The works range from small pieces that are about 12 inches wide to one large outdoor sculpture that is about 8 feet tall.

Focusing on each piece’s contrasts of contour and position, texture and surface, Meyer establishes a clear tension between the individual forms and their placement, and the richness of the materials. In 2 Forms with Sphere no.2, for example, Meyer positions a small, highly polished orb upon a roughly textured, rectangular, slab-like surface; its back rests against another larger rectangular form that also reﬂects the irregularities and abrasions of nature. The result is a precarious but pleasing balance of surface against surface and form against form.

In 3 Forms with Sphere no.2, a more columnar piece, the polished ball is safely ensconced in a protective niche of its own within the slab-like forms. It quietly draws the viewer into its space, suggesting, perhaps, a small moment of grace and serenity within a larger environment of imperfection and fracture. In some pieces, like 2 Forms no.7, or 2 Forms no.5, smoothly crafted, hard-edged, geometric shapes ﬂank a highly textural, organic central area that is almost ﬁssured in two. Although one becomes aware of the physical tension between opposing forms and textures, the gently modulated colorations, beautifully worked into the surface of the geometric shapes, reinforce their organic reference to the natural world.

There are two ﬁne ﬁgurative pieces in the show. Bianca and Thespian are nude female ﬁgures that have quirky appeal. Their bodies, at once distorted and graceful, convey a simple strength and balanced clarity. Here, even as Meyer explores the richness of his material, he makes keen reference to materials and process. He employs textural scratch marks on the surface of the sculptures that give clear evidence of the artist’s hand in the act of making art.

Judy Birke