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Sculptor on his mettle

Breon O’Casey’s works in bronze inhabit space wonderfully, says MICHAL BONCZA

Transitions

Pangolin Gallery
London N1

5/5

BREON O’CASEY was the son of the great Irish playwright Sean O’Casey but, unlike his father, pursued a very different artistic path in life.

“I learned to think with my hands as well as my head,” he once said of his time at Dartington Hall school in Totnes. 

No doubt that educational experience was significantly influenced by one of his teachers — Naum Slutzky, a Russian-Jewish refugee from nazism and former head of metalwork at the Bauhaus school in Germany.

The Bauhaus philosophy of seeking to harmonise the beautiful with the functional and innovation with affordable mass production might to some extent explain O’Casey’s single-minded engagement with the act of making rather than with questions of what works of art “mean.” 

In O’Casey’s case, as this exhibition of his work beautifully demonstrates, the shift from the intellectual to the emotional is explicit.

For O’Casey, who died in 2011, “art started” when man first picked up a stone — a far from random decision but a conscious act brought about by the sudden correlation between nature’s forces shaping the stone and the outcome which sparks the imagination.

Thus the choices O’Casey’s made in his work bear more than a passing resemblance to such human responses to the natural world and the birds on show here are not derived from studiously observing nature. 

Rather, they are memorised glimpses of the shapes they adopt to occupy space — animated as in Abstract Bird, still as in Flightless Bird, arrogant as in Proud Bird or flamboyant as in Stylised Bird.

Each is locked into an essentially abstract form that evocatively encapsulates the fleeting essence of such moments. 

Vivid and true, they embody the ephemeral but arresting quality of giant amulets or strange deities and emanate a serenity which seeks a comforting symbiosis with the viewer rather than challenging for dominance over space.

The inverted pyramids of the Plant ingeniously subvert the natural shape of a pine, much like a vertical zip that holds space together.

The comical Crow II with a pebble in its beak beautifully balances the “weights” either side of its hoof-like feet, with the tail dipping diagonally below the graceful mini plinth it stands on, and the robust silhouettes of the large and small Boats gladden the eye and spirit with the talismanic potency of their minimalist forms.

O’Casey’s human figures evoke purposefulness but are perhaps less distinctive, with the exception of the impressive Large Figure, coquettish Acrobat and sturdy Bather II.

Elevating the mundane to distilled aesthetic purity is the mark of exceptional talent, powerful vision and an enviable determination to articulate it.

The Pangolin remains one of the very few galleries in London where sculpture is curated with a discernment as rare as this and it’s to be commended in bringing O’Casey’s work to wider public view.

Runs until March 14. Free, opening times pangolinlondon.com

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