Contributed by Laurence Hegarty / Daniel Wiener’s naming system for his own work is quite precise. On his website, he states of the piece titled Clutching: “Genre: Sculpture | Like: Bowl | Placed: On A Shelf. ” Most would recognize that it is, well, a sculpture like a bowl, wherever it is placed. Wiener’s work dallies on a threshold between aesthetic bliss and mundane function. Into his semi functional world Wiener has smuggled images of faces: toothy grins, mouths agape, and wide-awake eyes returning the viewer’s gaze. In his current show at Satchel Projects, “Out in Front of the Back of Beyond,” the faces have migrated and are now sculptural objects. The viewer is placed in a direct encounter with a face. For Wiener, this shift is vital and intentional, as “the space of intimacy” – “two beings face-to-face in close proximity” – is the subject of his work.
The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicot has theorized that how each of us interprets the face of another is key to how and whether we achieve a sense of psychic and bodily integration and thus a sense of self. Wiener presents a sculptural discourse on this phenomenon. He is interested in how we understand that one is seeing a face at all. The ghoulish mess of loops, stains, coils, and marbled surfaces he fabricates from epoxy clay resists naturalistic representation while placing derangement squarely in our view, beckoning us with visual perplexity, jangling color, and gross distortion of what might be facial features.
23 x 19 x18 inches
30.75 x 31.5 x 1.5 inches
10.5 x 10 x 2.5 inches
Half Dissolving, wall-hung at eye level, is the most straightforward encounter with a face in the show. The facial features are set into a flat rectangle of mottled magenta and yellow. As facially literate adults, we know a pair of eyes, a nose, and a mouth when we see them. But Winnicott’s point is that reciprocal acknowledgment is essential to a sense of self. In the context of an art gallery, a good portrait that stares back at us from a gallery wall challenges spectatorial omnipotence. While most of Wiener’s sculptures offer a recognizable representation of the face, some strain the connection, leveraging the creepy quality of the epoxy and resembling dissected human bodies. They do not resolve into a conventional faces, so the overall effect is one of dislocation and estrangement – a perverse and intriguing result of intimacy.
Wiener works “blind” in the studio. He builds a mold into which he presses the epoxy material. He does not actually see what is happening in the mold, or what the finished sculpture will look like for days or weeks, until the material has set and he is able to demold the object. What happens behind the notional face he cannot see becomes crucial. He must imagine it. At some point, Wiener begins building elaborate extensions for the sculpture. In Polyphony Beyond the Baton’s Thrust, the arresting freestanding centerpiece of the show, elaborate buttresses and hand-formed coils of epoxy seem to mimic psychosis fronted by a rather goofy face. Wiener operates as something like, per Jagger, “the man who squats behind the man … who works the soft machine.” Like Burroughs, he is slicing and dicing the narrative logic of identity.
“Daniel Wiener: Out in Front of the Back of Beyond,” Satchel Projects, 526 West 26th Street, #913, New York, NY. Through May 30, 2026.
About the author: Laurence Hegarty is a New York-based artist and psychoanalyst.
