Man of Steel’s Industrial Web, Mirroring Nature

ROXY PAINE’S stainless-steel Dendroid sculptures seem to be straightforward enough at first, clearly recognizable as treelike forms. But they always manage to veer into ambiguous territory.

“Maelstrom,” for example, displayed on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year, posed as a mass of fallen trees in the aftermath of a storm. Yet its branches were supposed to exhibit decidedly unbranchlike behavior: fusing and connecting in the manner of neuron paths or pulses of energy. Mr. Paine’s Dendroids are never really just about trees.

“Distillation” is considered to be the most complex and immersive structure in his series of 22 Dendroids. It is now barreling through the James Cohan Gallery in New York. Here Mr. Paine pushes the metaphoric content that underpins these sculptures to new extremes. It still uses arboreal forms, but they now mesh with other overtly defined branching systems: a vascular network of arteries and veins with two plump kidneys, mushroom colonies and their germinating mycelia, neuron bundles and taxonomic diagrams, and raw pipelines connected to steel tanks and industrial valves.

Each one of his Dendroids is known to be made from standard industrial piping - the kind typically used by the pharmaceutical industry and nuclear power plants - that Mr. Paine bends, welds, grinds and polishes to turn them into seamless organic forms. They mirror nature but are sure to retain their gleaming industrial artifice. That dichotomy reflects the artist’s ambivalent feelings about tampering with nature.

Like his work Mr. Paine, 44, is also said to straddle worlds. He and his family split their time between an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and their home in rural Treadwell. In the country, he has converted a barn into a full-production metalworking shop that’s staffed by about a half-dozen assistants.

Disassembled Dendroids awaiting future installation are splayed out in the surrounding fields, their antlerlike steel components blinding in a strong sun, and beautifully moody in cloudy light. His “100 Foot Line,” scheduled to be installed this month at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, is a single tree trunk that tapers to a simple point; it is the antithesis of “Distillation.”

The Economist

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UNIT THREE

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