John Mccracken

" Jon McCracken is a man apart in the Minimalist art movement and certainly its brightest comet. Going against the Minimalist orthodoxy and especially its holiest canon-the seamless industrial look-McCracken has always made his sculptures the way a skier waxes his skis, with a need for personal alchemy so powerful that he concocts the resins, fivers and lacquers of which his objects are made. The result is powerfully strange. McCracken's studio is to the Minimalist industrial complex what a customizing shop is to an automobile factory. He pinstripes archetypes, dissipating the dualism between the universal and the unique, adding specific encoding to formal invariants and giving the universal a sort of home-made touch.

Hence the incredible vitality of his sculpture. Several fine examples are on view at the Almine Rech gallery: Cool, Where, Burst, Whoosh and Feel. They have no referent but themselves, giving space an absolute presence and endowing it with a strange density, a vibratory quality rarely found in basic geometrical shapes. Traversing the mathematical and the organic, balanced on the crest of an immaterial wave, McCracken's structures are uncategorizable. They have the flatness of the horizon and the vitality of a wave all at the same time."

- Excerpt from Frank Perrin Translation L-S Torgoff, Reviews, ArtPress 262, 2000.