A SHOW OF HEADS

Tom Bartel's Rapunzel – seemingly scarred by the effects of acute acne or scabrous with smallpox – serves as a reprise of the medieval vignette of Death and the Maiden, a reminder that youth and beauty are in the end only seeds of decay. The repellant Rapunzel manifests in her skin both an open register of the symptoms of disease and a visible ledger of days spent from an ever-dwindling account. The skin acts as a similar indicator of impermanence in Xipe Totec, a reference to the Aztec god of spring whose gruesome habiliment was a flayed human skin and whose followers adopted matching attire courtesy of their sacrificed victims. Reflecting the pathos of human aspirations to godlike immortality – a return to the spring of life through regeneration of the physical body – Bartel's sculpture presents only grotesque pallor and leathery stiffness where fear of mortality has sought the suppleness and blush of youth.

Tanya Batura's pair of sculptures Inhale and Exhale conjures an antithesis more profound than that of the contrary actions involved in breathing. The metaphor of an alternately inflating and collapsing bag tied securely with a leather knot triggers latent feelings of imprisonment in a skin and invokes the pathos of the human condition as both an intangible consciousness surpassing the fluidity and expansiveness of air and a physical body bound by the restrictions of gravity, time and entropy. The tragedy of this universal human predicament – suspension between the dream of immortality and the reality of death – has been the impetus to idealized representation of the figure from the frigid marble Apollos and Aphrodites of antiquity to the plastic perfection of Vogue and GQ models today. By deliberately shrouding the heads of her complementary pair, Batura circumvents the ideal without receding into the mundane or grotesque, and makes the mortality of flesh all the more obtrusive in the abstraction of a slow and labored breath.

The problem of expressing the intangibility of thought by means of a plastic medium has historically been the impetus to great psychological portraiture, particularly in the period of early modernism. Ironically, it has also – most likely because of the widespread acceptance of a mind-and-body duality – been the chief influence on the development of figural art’s antithesis: the purely formal language of the non-objective. These polarities, the figural and the non-objective, are brought together in the work of Cristina Cordova, as if to emphasize a reconciliation of their disparate stylistic traits at a more fundamental level of content. Cordova’s sculptures combine partial portrait busts – conveying, through the set of the mouth or the downward tug of a brow, the outward signs of internal stress, agitation, sorrow, or the numbness of loss – with tangled, turbulent masses of non-representational forms where both the hair and any invisible waves of mental energy might be imagined to emanate from the crania of her subjects. In works such as Cabeza Rojo the figural and the non-objective are tendentiously made complementary, and the subject’s thought, as a consequence, seems both palpable and ultimately elusive.

Spinning complex literary and theatrical allusions, Thaddeus Erdahl's The Remedy of Rafael Sabatini suggests the Freudian concept of art as a product of thwarted libido: a psychological compensation through which one conceals frustrated desires or perceived shortcomings in some areas by seeking to excel in others. Sabatini, the author of swashbuckling tales, sports the exaggeratedly long nose of Scaramouche, a buffoon in the 18th-century commedia dell'arte who is played for a time by the young French attorney-turned-revolutionary hero of Sabatini's novel Scaramouche. A paper bicorn hat set upon the sculpture's head evokes the pirate Captain Blood, a character made famous through Sabatini's other novels. These daring protagonists, Erdahl implies, fulfilled a fundamental need within the writer, who achieved a vicarious completion through their exploits. But Sabatini is hardly alone in bending art toward internal necessity. "As humans," Erdahl asserts, "we are compelled to tell stories that are rooted in personal mythology."

An image of absence despite the finely rendered, naturalistic detail that imparts to it the weight of life, Judy Fox's Krishna (Stolen Head) is deliberately displayed apart from the full-scale sculpted body to which it corresponds. Although this separation of head and body makes reference to heartbreaking scenes of destruction at archeological sites where "heads have been knocked off of temple sculptures, to reappear in fancy galleries for sale," the connotations of this sculptural fragment unfold on multiple levels. The similarity to a severed head on a pike invokes conquest and despoiling, but, curiously, the serenity drawn from an inner order – the chief promise made by spirituality – registers in faint luminosity on the half closed eyelids, tranquil mouth and untroubled brow of Krishna. Tinted with the silvery blue characteristic of votive depictions of the god, Fox's Krishna nevertheless seems ultimately more illustrative of the lofty potential of the human mind than of the powers of divinity.

Possessing a hybrid ancestry of fairytale magic in the story of Pinocchio, the trauma of martyrs writhing under the heavy hues and tenebristic drama of Baroque painting, an obsession with mysteries of alchemy, and a childhood fascination with horror movies, Arthur Gonzalez's series The Cadence of Stupidity elaborates a commentary on human foolishness. Its primary lens is introspective – initiating, as the artists asserts, "self-critiques of my personal relationship with stupidity" – but no human being can corner the market on folly, nor are any of us capable of abstaining from it. As a consequence, Gonzalez's series is from the outset universally applicable. The mixed-media, mixed-influence and mixed-message of humor and tragedy reflect life as a dark comedy of compromise and contradiction in which the roles of fool and sage, tormentor and victim, master and puppet are inextricable. Stinger suggests a businessman in the winter of discontent. Blue Salami hints at a more buoyant spirit through the self-deprecatory humor in its title, but in the end, as Gonzalez observes, "with a metaphor like a head on a platter, how deeply rooted can the optimism be?"

The gleam of ancient gold against the dark, brittle linen and black, crackled skin of a mummy forms a concise comment on vanity. Gold is an element, and nothing short of smashing protons in a particle accelerator can alter its intrinsic qualities. The human body, on the other hand, is an organism, and even modern science cannot preserve it against decay. Roxanne Jackson's Vanitas ­­– a macabre skull set with teeth of silver, gold and copper – highlights the pathos of the vain human aspiration to endure despite the inherent impermanence of the body. Along the same lines, her mixed-media Woolen encapsulates both fears and a morbid fascination with the body's metamorphosis. In this eerie image the gray hair of aging is linked to lycanthropy: a delusion of transformation from human into beast. Here the terrors of the unconscious seem to erupt from the flesh in a strangling mat as blackened lips and vacant eyes betray the anguish of reflection on mortality.

The pathos of blind heroism and a numbing exhaustion derived from fixation on misplaced ideals flood the filmy, pallid eyes of the fallen-hidalgo-turned-knight-errant in Doug Jeck's Don Quixote. The broken halo of a hat split like a leathery reptilian egg over the pate of the dubious hero, the deeply creased and sagging flesh fragmented into a crumbling ruin and the twisted, chicken-skin column of a neck are immediately recognizable as signs of the pointlessness of rebellion against the order of things. Reflecting on "the vulnerabilities and tragic-comedic state of the corporeal," Jeck's recent works are anti-heroic (or more precisely, anti-bravado), emphasizing, through jabs of malicious humor, the fragility of the masculine, just as Cervantes gleefully deflated illusions of chivalry. Jeck's Quixote elicits sympathy, to be sure, but also repugnance – which is perhaps at base a diversion from the knowledge that frailty, folly and futility are hardly unique to the constitutions of madmen from La Mancha.

Akio Takamori's act of inverting heads and conflating the human neck with the neck of a vessel suggests a probing of psychological content – a penetration of vision into the inner volume of an individual that the face (a mask that easily dissembles) cannot be trusted to reveal. The artist, who owns to "looking at people's faces and imagining who they are through the small opening of their eyes," does not attempt to convey this invented content to the viewer but rather invites him or her to engage in a parallel process of imagination. Titles such as Yellow Boy and Blue Man seem tendentiously non-committal, providing no more than a starting point for invention, but the sense of uncertainty that they perpetuate is different only in degree and not in kind from the uncertainty that accompanies every attempt to read another human being. After all, we cannot materially penetrate the barriers of another's mind. That a grasp even of our own mind is always synthetic and imprecise is suggested by the obvious resemblance of the Blue Man's features to Takamori's own.

Meticulously attentive to the marks impressed on the body by worldly experience, the sculptures of Tip Toland share with vanitas imagery an emphasis on the frailty and brevity of life. The evidence of her figures' susceptibility to bodily transformation parallels the incipient decay insinuated by the faint browning of petals and discoloration of fruits in Baroque memento mori paintings: metaphorical reminders of entropy, the arrow of time and the fate that awaits all living things. But a crucial distinction separates Toland's representations of the human condition from the vanitas convention. Whereas the latter is ultimately disparaging of the worldly because of its ephemerality, Toland's sculptures employ the evidence of ephemerality to heighten the preciousness of the moment, to honor experience and to extol the value of life up to the very end.