Sculptor Jerry Harris

Abstract Paths to Freedom

The Sculpture of Jerry Harris

By

Maria Pia Cappello- Rome, Italy

" The Armies of The Night." Bronze, forged iron, and found objects. No. 58 on side bar. Collection: Ms. Kitty Fasset,

Oakland, California.

Jerry Harris's art consists in the work's construction and combination from previous to modern methods of  sculpting and modeling in order to effect the abstract penetration of form in the sculpture of bodies and spaces. His thin, round, and pointed silhouette forms acquire psychological, sexual, sensual and social significance, and can be interpreted in so many ways and remember Samuel Taylor Coleridge's verses: " Walls and towers were

girdled round...the shadow of  dome  pleasure floated midway on waves.

It was a miracle of a rare device--a damsel with a dulcimer in a vision once I saw her symphony  and song. I would build that dome in air--close your eyes and drunk the milk of Paradise."

Harris uses bronze, fiberglass, chrome, iron, laminated clay, wood, and disparate  found objects. He then moulds compositions to suggest hitherto unexpressed thoughts and deeper unconsciousness suggested in The Last Flight of Icarus, Captured Forms in Space, and Night Rider.

Henry Moore said, "Art is abstract in one sense," and Harris's allusive representations arouse in the observer associations of ideas and thought that renew the relationship between sculpture, memories, primitave art, and surrounding spaces, as we can grant in his excellent works, "Me'nage a trois" and "Reclining Warrior: Homage to Henry Moore.

Maillol affirmed that," Negro Art contains more ideas than Greek Art. We no longer know how to take such liberties; we are too much tied to the past." Picasso described it as "reasonable." Mattise asserted that, "It was based on material and invented proportions and form."

Harris, in his sculpture "Dogon Mother and Child," underlines the strength, and stems from the art form of primitive people expressed in his maternal attractive and frankly primordal Eden-like existence.

For Plato and Airistotle, man was regarded as the homo symbolicum--the creative whose distinct character was the creation and manipulation of signs.

Harris's man has discovered his own new world that is concentrated on the interplay of "correspondences" employing a metaphor as a means of detachment or criticism, parody or irony.

By catching movement in the significant instant and seeking to seize the fugitive movements, the sculpture becomes a sort of victory over pain and defeat, remembering Baudelaire's verses, "Everything is allegory."

The French man Paul Claudel, poet and brother of the sculptor Camille Claudel--lover to Rodin, said, Aprés le long silence fulmant...haleine la terre en culture l'Esprit de nouveau, soudain le souffle de nouveau."

Jerry Harris's works form a mass with the ground, but they interrelate within the atmosphere created by the sculptor and each figure rises to a solitary apex, creating an impression of individual reserve, lifting the viewer's imagination to his or her own devices.

However, in his anthromorphic, biomorphic, and geometric representation, Harris transports peasant and worker's tools poetically into an empty space from which they radiate into manifold directions obtaining metal work sculptures naturally brought into close touch with the implements of life.

It is important to notice that between Picasso's cubist and surrealist constructions, Harris has a much stronger, more spectacular "social" interest in a tribal art connecting him to Breton's quotation, "Man...is above all, the plaything of  his memory."

The idea conveyed is that the past is contained in the present, and is part of it. It is an impression---a sensation, a remembrance bringing emotions of that past to the surface.

This is Marcel Proust's theory of recollection, of emotional memory, according to which he sought and lived the past over again. Since man has cultivated his rational powers, Harris's task is to heal irrational and dull  spirits by restoring man's constructive impulses and in Harris's case, using all the shapes that  create emotive images in his sculptures.

Jerry Harris displays the technical complexities which establishes him as one of the great Post-Post Modernists. In his sculptures, he moulds the dynamism of open aerial forms.

They are disengaged from the static problems of the equilibrium of masses where shapes are not opposed rigorously, but rendered ungraspable, totally abstract, by their projection in space, breathing the air of life.

Moreover, we can say that Harris's Modernity oscillates between different poles: The everyday impression, the fleeting instant, History, Knowledge, the delights of sense perception, rapid glimpses, allegories and abstract paths to freedom.

Copyright 2013, Maria Pia Cappello. All rights reserved.