New York
Grace Building
The works in John Monti’s recent series “Beauties,” or more casually “flower clusters,” touch on elements of Surrealism associated with Kurt Seligmann or Joan Miró. With their heightened organic levity, these unique individuals might be seen as intertwined flora and fauna – plantlike entities given over to a spontaneous bursting forth into quizzical, unexpected forms with an alien presence. Less humanoid than cunningly eerie inhabitants of another world, their weird organs remain isolated, as if discovered in a lost spacecraft hovering between turbulent galaxies. Their roguish color binaries hold a tempo between intensely pinkish and yellowish hues, calling to mind a Flash Gor don time machine miraculously forged in foam and resin-coated fiberglass and spray-painted with fluorescent color. Flourishing trinkets, cast resin flowers, gorgeous amputations, these ponderous, ironically pathetic creatures are born of a coy, yet sensible, if not solicitous imagination.…see the entire review in the print version of March’s Sculpture magazine.
