Short Reviews

BY RICHARD TOBIN

THE MAGAZINE, Santa Fe, NM

            The sculptures of Ed Haddaway featured last month in a show at Horwitch LewAllen Gallery.

            A cursory look at Haddaway’s painted steel cutouts could easily mislead viewers to dismiss the work as a variant of the current trend of eco-art, a dumbed-down hyphenated pastiche of recycled 1980s BAD ART and 1990s Primitive, whose eratz-Unicef styles hype a faux-global, Toys R Us humanism.

            Unwittingly or no, Haddaway’s work is a rightful heir to Bad Art, in which the last decade confronted self-conscious contrivance and historicism by openly embracing these unavoidable consequences of a long Modernist achievement.

            They disassembled its twin engines of flat cubist shape and Expressionist hue like Lego toys, breaking them down and reassembling their tube-color facets into highly personal expressions rich in invention and self-deprecating wit.

            Like them -- and like Paul Klee and Joan Miro before them -- Haddaway is playful in form and execution, a storybook seer who peers through distorted limb lens to give us a glimpse of human innocence no child could contemplate.

            Haddaway’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cat has all the jest of the Max Ernst bronze, The King Playing with the Queen. The larger-than-life steel l group, Meeting of Like Minds, depicts the stiff embrace of two polychromed stick figures with matching gulls perched on their heads.

            For all the silliness, Haddaway manages convey through caricature, here as elsewhere, something of universal tenderness. He makes the bird-brained pair in Meeting worthy of the motif they share in common with Giotto’s moving encounter of Joachim and Anna, tilting forward to embrace before Jerusalem’s Golden Gate.

October 1996