Denis Versweyveld, Four Houses on a Plinth, 2012. Concrete, lath, and plaster, 44.5 x 11.5 x 9 in.

Denis Versweyveld

Rutland, Vermont

Castleton Downtown Gallery

Denis Versweyveld’s sculptures and drawings view familiar household objects and minimal houses through a meditative lens. Each form, executed in plaster, lath, and cast concrete, is pared down to its essence. Signs of this process, like fine etching lines, remain in the exquisite surfaces. The forms are either miniaturized or human scale, portraits of what we live with every day: a cup, a pitcher, a bowl. The sense of the maker’s hand is ever-present in the dialectic between materiality and refinement, texture and reductive form. Some of the subjects look as if they had stepped out of a Morandi still-life, now claiming existence in three dimensions. The title of the show, “A Sense of Place,” refers to how we define the spaces in which we live. Versweyveld believes that awareness of our lived environment is a key to understanding the depth of meaning offered by the familiar. …see the entire review in the print version of April’s Sculpture magazine.