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Ron Mueck (1958-)

Whether spoken or silent, directed or not, standing as the imperative absolute throughout the various eras and epochs of sculpture’s evolution is the somewhat absurd and slightly bourgeoisie maxim that the imitation of life is tantamount to the intimation of it, and that’s something of a shameful event.

From Pygmalion to Rodin, there lies a certain incomprehensible, faintly detestable, unimaginative penchant for the evocation of awe based upon the replicate.

That the metallurgies of man might indeed be forged to form something greater or more illustrious than him is often relegated to the tangential in modern sculpture with only a few brilliant minds like Louise Bourgeois and Joan Miro coming, not to the stage but often to the wings, woefully enamored in the arms of the so called “avant-garde.”

Certainly though, the true mark of any valiant, redemptive artist lies in their prowess for rediscovering the transcendent in the otherwise redundant and mournfully accepted, and just such artistry is found in the work of Ron Mueck.

Mueck's "The Baby"

No less a sculptor than a mirror maker, Rueck’s work is incanted with such a prodigious realism that its contours define the very essence of nuance and eerie transmigration; stare into one of his works and the void indeed stares back at you.

But far from being drowned in the ominous veils of mystery, it’s a void cleansed in the righteous purity of the familiar, making it all the more haunting.

The humanity exuded in Rueck’s works seethes with all the terror of the unnerved in between its inanimate physique, while the energies of the uncanny bursts so wildly out the seams of that physique, that the dialectic synthesizes what can only be described as the imperious unheimlich.

Placid and disquiet, Rueck captures the proverbial in reclusive, often gargantuan form, and leaves the creation of dialogue to patrons hovering around his magnificent world of ghost and grievance.

And who indeed are the ones left speechless?

Mueck's "Seating Boy"

Far more eloquent than the paltry forms from which they found their inceptive emulation, Rueck’s sculptures belie in their static discontent the enigmatic hallmarks of the human condition frozen to the pangs of time.

And only in that icy grip do we find ourselves “more truly and more strange.”¹  ◙

1. Wallace Stevens. Tea At The Palaz Of Hoon.