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Installation view of sculptures by Chryssa, 1988 mixed mediums at Castelli Greene Street. 

Chryssa at Castelli Greene St.

Using what is best described as a Constructivist/Synthetic-Cubist mode, Chryssa creates wall sculptures with a variety of urban references, ranging from billboard signs (for example, City-scape: Times Square, No 1, 1979-81) to abstract landscape (for example, Cityscape: Mott Street, No. 1, 1980-82) The works are materially rich-honeycomb aluminum, sheet metal, neon, metallic paint- and formally complex. Above all, they brilliantly convey a sense of entanglement, seemingly as an end in itself, and offer a kind of frenetic shorthand reminiscence-epitomization- of modernist ideas. Thus, the shapes in Cityscape: Times Square No.3 (1983) allude to both Arp's free-form smooth curvilinearity and David Smith's rough-edged angular quirkiness (irksomeness).

The discontinuities in these pieces are inseparable from their vitality, in Cityscape: Mott Street No. 3 (1987) the work falls into two indirectly reconcilable parts, asymmetrical yet equivalent in weight and balanced in their juxtaposition in Cityscape: Mott Street, No. 2 (1985) another formal ambiguity becomes evident; figure shape functioning as hieroglyph, hieroglyph functioning as figure-an appropriate convergence for the Chinatown part of Mott Street. Indeed, I found myself, no doubt naively trying to specify the place alluded to, even though I knew that Chryssa had offered us an abstract amalgam of various "spots" along its way. Yet the works are peculiarly "site-specific" in their feel for the streets that name them.

In New York, energy seems desirable almost for itself, rather than for what it can effect. Chryssa's abstract treatment of the city's violent energy- and there is a sense of inherent conflict in these sculptures of tension about to become chaos-dignifies it. Her peculiarly combative sculptures read as a statement of New York heroism- the heroism required to live there on a daily basis. 

Also special about the sculptures is the way their metal conveys physical rawness. The metal acquires an autonomous physical presence-an existence free of its use in the work, as though the work were the setting making its presence "ecstatic". This primitive yet abstract physicality confirmed by the restlessness of the works-Chryssa seems to find it impossible to continue going in the same direction with one line for long- and their ambiguous volume-some works seem like rambling, free-form cages, others have a blocklike concentration-suggest a kind of last stand of metal in a world of plastic. Certainly, art historically, they seem the grand, sophisticated, elegant conclusion of what such sculptors in welded steel as Julio Gonzalez and David Smith began.
- Donald B. Kuspir 

Art in America September 1988