Review: Patrick Hill at David Kordansky Gallery

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When photography was invented, painting went into convulsions, creating more styles more swiftly than ever before. Now that the Digital Age is upon us, sculpture is undergoing similar shifts: All sorts of artists are making all sorts of works that invite viewers to contemplate the relationship between three-dimensional reality and its virtual surrogate.

At the David Kordansky Gallery, Patrick Hill’s four sculptures dance back and forth between the two-dimensional world of electronically transmitted pictures and the 3-D reality of clunky substances.

Each of the two biggest is a diptych of sorts. Both begin with a 9-foot-long beam that Hill has saturated with black dye and laid flat on the floor. Each of the beams serves as a pedestal for an approximately 6-foot-square sheet of tinted glass, which stands upright and at an angle from the business end of each sculpture: two huge lumps of painted concrete in “Screen” and a large lump of concrete that wraps around a vertical beam in “Biter (Chain of Love).”

Think of the two works as crude viewing instruments from the early days of optics, only too unwieldy to effectively illustrate anything specific or useful. To walk around each is to give yourself over to a series of rich visual experiences.

Sometimes the glass functions as a window, turning the concrete into a shadowy image. At others it’s a reflective backdrop, accentuating the tactility of the concrete. If Robert Smithson and Larry Bell had collaborated, the results might resemble these pieces.

Hill’s three small paintings fall flat. Even though they are made of thickly slathered concrete, they lack the shape-shifting drama of his larger works.

The best of these big works is “Horizontal (Erotic City).” Its jaunty combination of marble, metal and concrete, alongside glass, wood and canvas, as well as paint, stain and dye, replace the this-or-that ambiguity of his diptychs with the whiplash visual shifts of a triptych in triplicate. It’s too complex to sum up and a pleasure to encounter in the flesh.

-- David Pagel

David Kordansky Gallery, 3143 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 558-3030, through March 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Above: Patrick Hill’s ‘Biter (Chain of Love)’ (2009), wood, glass, concrete, steel, ink, epoxy. Credit: Fredrik Nilsen / David Kordansky Gallery