Local Sculptor Adds ‘Soaring Sense of Spirit’ to L.A. Show

BY SANDY BALLATORE

ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL

      LOS ANGELES -- Unfortunately the words “The Incredible Lightness of Being” have already titled a book by Milan Kundera. They could as easily describe Albuquerque artist Ed Haddaway’s new nearly moving sculptures. That phrase would communicate the sculptures’ soaring sense of spirit.

       No sculptures that I have seen recently extends the idea of the essence of being (the spirit as distinct from the body) into sculptural form as well as does this work now on exhibit at Gallery West in Los Angeles. Haddaway’s use of space, more space than form, and flat steel shapes that seem to move through it in wavelike and step-like motions, imply that matter is not static but fluid. Sculpture, therefore, need not be primarily physical or theoretical; it may be emotional, even innocent in its rawness and accessibility.

       This non-frozen gestural quality is the antithesis of massive and to the rock-like ground-hugging mounds of solidity that seem to grunt rather than sing. Haddaway’s sculpture contrastingly, reminds one of dance and music, celebration and best of all, play.

Fifteen years ago, I would not have dared use the word “play” in a critique. Its demeaning anti-intellectual implication would have indicated blind naivete on the artist’s part, as recent theoreticians have told us, however, post-modern art embraces all aspects of existence, especially beauty, joy, and the desire to escape into fantasy in sculptural and architectural forms.

    Haddaway’s sculptures refer to his longing for innocent escape. They do not attack, as some formal sculptures seem to, but simply entertain expansively, especially at monumental scale. (At Shidoni Foundry in Tesuque where he exhibits work locally A 20-foot-tall sculpture titled A Timeless Fable She Said is the best that I have seen, perhaps because it is exhibited outdoors, and it basks in the open air, like a child embracing the freedom of recess.)

      At coffee-table size, however, the scale of much of the Gallery West show, frivolity is too easily seen as a single purpose. Other pieces in the in the gallery are 5 to 6 feet tall, and they command attention in a more dramatic way. Overall, this exhibition is too crowded with work: The important relationship of space to form that Haddaway establishes in the work is diminished.

       Haddaway’s most clever sculptural strategy is simplicity. Many works employ only five to ten shapes, causing the space around, in, over, and under to become shaped and delineated, therefore activated in surprising ways.

        As one moves around the works, everything seems to hang or move precariously in space. One mentally bounds up steps, glides through doorways and windows that need no walls, bumps over accordion pleats and zooms around a moon’s looping eclipse. For rest, the eye lands comfortably on a shiny red disk or a warm, yellow spiral. One cannot help but wonder how so little form creates so much action.

           These sculptures play with one’s imagination and with one’s physicality as [the works of] the painter Joan Miro do: We are a solid (we think); they are so ephemeral.

            When I asked the artist whether this painter inspires him, Haddaway explained that when he discovered Miro’s art in Spain, he felt as if he had found a friend. “I would really have loved to talk to him,” Haddaway said. “I felt as if he and I were thinking about the same thing exactly.”

               Haddaway’s interest in movement also brings to mind the mobiles and stabiles of modernist Alexander Calder He also defied formalist tradition by using bright color and a playful orientation to sculpture.

July 1989