Corriero, Segre, Seidl: Open, enveloping, searching

Contributed by Michael Brennan / I have long admired the work of the three artists Michelle Segre and Guy Corriero, whose work is now on display at “Fly like a Flea, Sink like a Stone” at Springs Projects, as well as Claire Seidl, whose show “Days Like These” is up at Helm Contemporary.

Corriero’s transition from abstract painter to sculptor par excellence, about a dozen years ago, was remarkable. He has earned the Picasso-esque label “painter/sculptor,” whose implicit tonnage makes “interdisciplinary” sound tinny. While I see William Tucker‘s welcome influence in Corriero’s mass and his tactile surfaces, his own distinct hand – in particular, a sense of form and volume – is also apparent. Corriero’s wood sculptures are scrappy and possess an indelicate kind of beauty. He is occasionally rough and never precious with his materials. His wood surfaces are sometimes pocked with hammer dings or relentlessly hole-punched like a Lucio Fontana painting, crossing Spatialist action with the tattooing of a woodpecker. This yields in Corriero’s wooden sentinels an unspoken grace, imparting the humanistic openness, proportion, and stance of ancient Cycladic idols. Not all his work, of course, is so majestic. Circus Town gives off the hypnotic joy of a Japanese pachinko machine.

Many sculptors – particularly those involved with weaving, fabric, and fiber – have embraced what I might describe as the spider-woman aesthetic, highlighted in Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s short story “ A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings.” This perspective infers from phenomena resembling spider’s webs a feminist worldview that combines folklore – or an emphasis on craft – with postmodern irreverence in energetic and all-enveloping approaches. It underpins the work of several adventurous sculptors, notably Sheila Hicks and Sheila Pepe, and few do it better than Michelle Segre. Segre’s sculpture tracks the webbing of her mind and her hand at work, rendering it lightweight in the weightiest sense. Her art always feels activated and intensely personal. While she and Corriero make very different kinds of objects, they share a fondness for woven or drawn radii and beading or chains, which ensure dynamism in their work.

Segre’s Parasitrea is so encompassing that it reminds me of the starship Enterprise’s encounter with a giant space amoeba. I’m only half joking. Even at modest chandelier-size, her sculptures seem super-galactic. Cosmopavlova II resembles a solar system with (actual) orbiting birds’ nests.

Claire Seidl has a hot hand. At her most restless, she makes one of the fiercest marks in painting since the late Louise Fishman, so pronounced because her line tends to allude to volume. Her marks are often embedded into or incised above her brushwork, sometimes working in conjunction and sometimes contrapuntally. Anything but static, they establish velocity – a quality often absent in contemporary art. And her scored surfaces have a raw visual power that suggests a searching agita and lends her painting gravitas. Perhaps most importantly, Seidl’s work, like that of Segre and Corriero, reflects the artist’s complete immersion.

Michelle Segre & Guy Corriero: “Fly like a Flea, Sink like a Stone”, Springs Projects, 20 Jay St., 3rd Floor, Brooklyn, New York. Through April 5th.

Claire Seidl, “Days Like These”, Helm Contemporary, 132 Bowery, 3rd Floor, New York, New York. Through March 28th.

About the author: Michael Brennan is a Brooklyn based abstract painter who writes on art. Follow him on Instagram @hopfroggowanus