Contributed by Rachel Youens / The sculptures in Jim Osman’s show “Walnut 3,” now at McKenzie Fine Art, are both architectonic and playful. His constructions, placed on pedestals, are formalist balancing acts made of found lumber, some elements lightly reworked, that are stacked and arranged. Osman’s overall intention is to find a complex situation for entry, where forms assembled from Euclidean solids generate stability or dynamism through exquisitely contrasting proportions and scale. The experience of seeing unfolds in the extended time required to walk around each small free-standing work.
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The title of the show refers to Osman’s first use of walnut, which he discovered in 2019. He had been building sculptures from pine, poplar, and fir, but found that walnut absorbed light, adding depth and a sonorous bass tone to his pieces. It also absorbed paint colors evenly, allowing him to broaden his range of decision making and craft.
Osman is a classicist for whom the placement of each solid corresponds to neighboring parts and to the whole. To establish stability, he often starts with platforms that eventually suggest porches, windows, frames, and cantilevers. The pieces develop as spaces of passage that we are invited to walk through, look under, and survey from above. In his studio, Osman modifies found and given discards with decisive, razor-sharp cuts, some hand-sawn. He then assembles them, experimenting with the weights and positions of his pieces to test how they can stand before seamlessly dovetailing, doweling, gluing and joining them.
Paint is also an important element in Osman’s work. He renders squares, parallelograms, and Xes on his wood grain surfaces in hyper-flat Mediterranean tones of brown, pink, orange, and blue. These forms both reiterate and contrast with the planes of his constructed geometric assemblages. He often plays warm against cool in front and back views, injecting surprise into our 360-degree experience of a piece. The interplay of form with paint produces a sensation of kinetic pleasure.
In Canter, a raised, slanted platform supports the linear edges of a rectangle that is cantilevered to one side, on which a bench-like form sits, setting the perpendicular off-kilter. Fugue consists of a sledded platform supporting a bent pier behind a screen of diamond shapes, topped by a mitered tree section exposing its own cross-section. Gale is low to the ground and frontal, its gravitational simplicity challenged by a wooden parachute held in place by stilts. Vertical spaces in Trellis suspend an elliptical urban skyway. Level opposes two piers in large and smaller scales spanned by a narrow passageway.
Standing in the gallery’s center space is the human-sized Clock,constructed from 100-year-old pine beams that Osman has planed and finished to a luminous porosity with characteristic knots and dry linear cracks. The work’s physical presence and monumentality suggest a grand portal hosting two dramas. In the first, a horizontal beam, suspended on blocks, juts into the portal’s space, intersected by another beam parallel to the portal, forming an alcove. In the second, an orange gable on the taller post challenges stability of the lintel, which rests on the gable’s sharp edge. The intersecting forms and vectors of Clock encapsulate Osman’s essential project: to create multiplicities of balance, whose interactive surfaces, forms, and colors define spaces that can shape our awareness, activate our perceptions, and inhabit our memories.
“Jim Osman: Walnut 3,” McKenzie Fine Art, 55 Orchard Street, New York, NY. Through December 21, 2024.
About the author: Rachel Youens is a painter, writer, and adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design, The New School, and at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2008–09 and exhibits regularly in NYC.
