The Triton Museum in Santa Clara, which has showcased local artists for many years, is exhibiting 20 years’ worth of work by sculptor Marc D’Estout—formalist reductions he considers ‘sculptural haikus.’ D’Estout works primarily in welded and hammered steel, a testament to his experience in custom car and furniture fabrication, filtered through his long experience with installation and conceptual art. The eccentric, absurdist humor of his modestly-sized constructions is on full display in A Singular Evolution, a large show of perhaps 50 pieces installed in the museum through April 19.
D’Estout’s sensibility marries Surrealist humor with Minimalist form and a craftsman’s love of surface and patina. His works range from floor pieces the size of small pieces of furniture—“domestic objects,” in the artist’s parlance, which is also the name of his website—suggesting machines and devices of unknown purpose; to medium-sized pieces that are mounted to the walls as if floating or perching; to small “hybrid” pieces employing found objects that repose on pedestals or inside vitrines. The steel sculptures almost always suggest tools, because of their polished surfaces and symmetry, but are also somehow vaguely anthropomorphic.
Surrealist menace is present, if subtle. Spikes like narwhal horns and elongated cones coexist in “Topper,” a pair of dunce-cap shapes set above and below a disk-like hat brim. “J’Accuse” is a large wall-mounted hook, or predatory bird’s beak (begging the question: any relation to France’s Dreyfus case?) “Trophy,” a long narrow spike rising from a conical head—sadly atrophied—is affixed to the wall, seemingly mocking the executions of defenseless animals by lesser members of our species.
D’Estout’s recurring cones and funnels open up his closed forms without revealing their contents, suggesting disreputable but humorous bodily functions. “Parasite”‘s pair of narrow conical pipe bowls are connected by a long curved form reminiscent of cattle horns and in “Clog,” a filled-in biomorphic curved funnel is useless for holding or carrying fluids. “The Secret” and “Bad Pet” features funnels that are inserted into, respectively, a pillow-torso and a neck hole.
Other pieces are built on rounded, benign forms. “A Specious Bubble” is comprised of three spherical forms conjoined like bubbles, and covered in gold-flake oil paint, recalling bowling balls. “The Brat” and “Bob” are mask-like heads comprised of double spheres of matte pinkish flesh; in the former, the head is broken with a crown of shards suggestive of shattered lightbulbs, and the figure’s cartoonish painted Reddy-Kilowatt eyes have been abraded into blurs with a red-pink tongue that protrudes absurdly; in the latter, three circular sockets serve as empty eyes and mouth.
“Sneeze,” with its ameboid explosion of forms, captures the familiar form of inflated, everted nitrile gloves, invoking the universal fears of infection during the pandemic years. “Spore,” another germaphobe’s nightmare, suggests a molecular model—say, of Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine—but is composed of blue-green worlds, as frightening as a balloon animal.
A few of the medium-sized sculptures are displayed next to the charcoal drawings that were made as preliminary studies. “Pinhead,” with its thorn-like shaft rising from a rounded handle, resembles a practical sewing or gardening implement, an awl or a dibble; the title steers us toward seeing it anthropomorphically, as shoulders from which a slender neck arises and tapers, sharpened down to a point (or vanishing point). The somewhat similar piece, “The Little Dictator,” with its title evoking Chaplin’s 1940 antiwar film, The Great Dictator, was made in 2017, and unfortunately seems just as relevant eight, not to mention 85, years later.
The dark, looming ovoid of “Myopic Isolator” suggests a hot-air balloon, a punching bag, and one of the faceless mannequin heads from Italian Metaphysical paintings from a century ago. Its pink vertical eye-shaped aperture where the nose would be suggests the organic trapped within the mechanical, as well as the suggestive almond-shaped mandala of Gothic religious sculpture.
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The droll wit of D’Estout’s steel sculptures continue the anarchic satirical individualism of Bay Area artists of the past. The assemblage pieces, suggested by and made from studio oddments—“broken toys, tools, industrial products, car parts, hardware, etc.”—sound this note even more strongly. This large show rewards careful observation, as each piece is a singular evolution synthesizing idea, emotion, and handicraft.
One might with interpret “The Seeker,” a steel mask with slit eyeholes mounted atop three spindly legs, as a H.G. Wells Martian war machine, or as a self-portrait of the artist on the creative prowl. Then too, it could easily be a portrait of the viewer—trying, like Giacometti’s late Surrealist sculpture, to hold the void and grasp the invisible.
A SINGULAR EVOLUTION: A 20-YEAR SURVEY OF MARC D’ESTOUT runs through April 19. Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara. More info here.
