Ideas in Stone

Lito Tejada-Flores
2004

Do we love works of art for what they are? Or for what they do to us? Or for the way they provoke, even force us to react to them? John Reeves work works on me, provokes me, and for this I love it.

The mysterious, shifting geometry of Reeves’ sculptures pushes its way into our perceptions, our consciousness, our lives. This sculpture simply won’t take yes for an answer. You can’t just say: yes, I get it. This is a stone sphere, a granite arc, a marble ring. In front of these sculptures you can’t say: I see what I see, and I know what it is that I am seeing, because John has done something remarkable. He has separated these solid stone statements from their very form…or, at the very least, from our everyday ability to perceive their form.

Sculpture is form occupying space. But what exactly is the form of these fluid rings of stone? – these shifting holes in granite, limestone, marble, even wood that allow light and air and thoughts to flow around and through these sculptures rather than bounce off them?

Reeves refers to one of his signature carvings as a “tetring” because its curving ring-like shape bends in the vertical plane to touch a series of imaginary points that would be generated by a self-intersecting double tetrahedron. Compleity under apparent simplicity. But that doesn’t begin to tell us, or explain, what we are actually seeing. Walking slowly around one of John Reeves’ eccentric rings of stone challenges our native ability to see and understand form.

As you walk around this ambiguous statement in stone you observe in succession: a circle, a square with round corners, a soft rectangle with pinched-in sides, a figure eight, which soon turns itself into a kind of double figure eight or – as some astonished viewers blurt out – a double helix, which becomes a curvey diamond, then a straight diamond shape, then, stepping closer, a triangle, which rounds slowly into that circle again. Damn! How is this possible? These are sculptures that ask questions that stubbornly resist one’s best answers.

Ideas in stone, or perhaps, better yet, koans in stone. The perceptual puzzle more important than the conceptual explanation. The questions these handsome, hand-carved, hand-polished stone sculptures ask us are more important than any replies we can give. They are illustrations of lessons we haven’t yet learned.

Buddhist teachers often talk about emptiness, the ultimate lack of a permanent, immutable essential nature – in phenomena, and in ourselves. Buddhist emptiness is all about the notion of contingent existence: The fact that I, we, they, it, anything, are not intrinsically I, we, they, anything, but rather a restless shifting complex of action and interaction. Yesterday’s approximation of reality becoming tomorrow's new version, equally suspect, equally approximate, equally questionable.

John Reeves is not exactly a Buddhist sculptor carving Buddhist sculptures, but these stone statements are as restless and ungraspable as the toughest questions that a Zen master ever threw out to challenge and wake up a student. John’s sculptures grow out of formal geometry, yet completely escape its formal limits. They keep moving, or should I say, keep our thoughts moving where words, diagrams and formulas falter and fail.

Finally I should add that these beautiful sculptures shouldn’t be confused with the dry and passionless computer-carved school of mathematical sculpture, shapes generated from 3-D equations, untouched it often seems by human hands or heart. Reeves’ mysterious and elusive formless forms are sensual and satisfying. They have been carved, and ground, and rubbed, and polished into existence with care, and skill; with a blend of craftsmanship and patience that is as rare in today’s art world, as in today’s world period.

Carving these baffling stone conundrums, John Reeves, has achieved. not the impossible but the highly improbable. Translating ideas into stone without freezing them in stone.

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