BOBBIE ALLEN:Sculptor unleashes emotions set in stone

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Sculpture is not for the lighthearted collector. We’re not talking about figurines here. We’re talking about full size, heavy pieces that take up space. You can’t put them on the otherwise-unused space of your walls. There must be a spot dedicated to it, set aside for it.

Sculpture also has a presence that paintings don’t have. A sculpture takes up the same dimensions we do. It therefore demands similar attention, as if someone were in the room with us.

Of course, I don’t mean dolphins or whales or cowboys on bucking broncos — these are glorified figurines, really; mass produced giant knickknacks.

Real sculpture is hand wrought, one-of-a-kind. And sculpture since Rodin has become an expression of space, a way to intrude into the viewer’s senses and stir up the space around us.

Zimbabwean sculptor Joseph Muzondo works in serpentine, a relatively soft stone that comes in a wide range of earthy tones (his work is on view at Joseph Wise gallery, 1550 So. Coast Highway).

Among a whole spectrum of sculptures on display at Joseph Wise, Muzondo’s work stands out because of its full-on stone knowledge.

Muzondo works with hand tools, and that fact shows on the stone itself. This is impressive in and of itself because the skill involved — to gain control over each blow, to know how to work with weaknesses and strengths in the stone — takes knowledge.

Picture taking a hammer and a chisel to a boulder to shape it into anything, much less actually having an effect on the stone other than destruction, and you’ll see what I mean.

But many sculptors still work with hand tools. Muzondo, though, also has a keen sense of form.

“Begging in the Millenium” (roughly 50 inches by 30 inches) has a spooky, disturbing presence. It’s a reclining figure, almost piled in stone, looking up as if propped on an elbow.

It is, however, an abstract figure. The surface of the stone ranges from highly polished to barely finished at all. Muzondo uses his tools like a paintbrush, varying the texture all along this extreme range.

What’s most impressive about his technique is that there is a sense of flesh and bone under the abstraction, of musculature and movement.

This figure wants something from me. It wants me to see desperation and sadness.

Muzondo’s most successful pieces are emotive. The figures speak.

“Genius Lady” (23 x 16 x 9) is a substantial female bust. It’s a bit on the massive side, but its angular lines and flowing hair reveal the African influences that contributed to the art deco movement.

Muzondo alludes to this cleverly in her angular polished neck and squared off shape, and even in her enigmatic expression.

But she also is a reference to cubism, which raises another interesting aspect of Muzondo’s style. Cubism sought to present only the most basic characteristics of a figure, eliminating detail. The movement was highly influenced by African sculpture (as well as other cultures that use abstraction from all over the globe, such as Indonesia and Japan).

Cubism was primarily a movement in paint. The sculpture that emerged from the movement, such as the work of Henry Moore, was actually influenced by painting — trying to make the three-dimensional look more flat.

So it is with Muzondo’s work. The pieces pass the test of the walk-around: They are interesting from all angles.

But they are very shallow. This gives them an ethereal quality, a clarity.

They are not competing for room — they are attempting to abstract something into meaning with a painter’s sensibility.

Take the fascinating “Before Eve.” It’s a male figure, standing about 60 inches high, the torso resting on U-shaped legs (many of Muzondo’s works seem to be in two pieces). He has a monumental quality, hunched and hungry-looking.

The alternating rough stone and polished surface gives him the quality of a drawing, a cartoon or study. But he is only 10 inches deep, a narrow expression of stone.

But what an expression. His pursed lips kiss empty air. There’s a wonderful ambiguity. The figure is wild, but not lost or pathetic. He is fierce, sturdy, but incomplete.

“Queen of Tonga” is also very shallow, but she has a totally different feel — her long torso and neck seem to follow the natural curve of the stone. Her breasts lie flat on her body (an experienced woman), her hair takes on the quality of natural wood.

Her body rests in a scooped out section of stone that is carved in a careful wave-like pattern, as if she is emerging from it. It speaks of elegance and pride, and the real source of female beauty and power aided by skillful manipulation of elemental stone.

In “Before Eve,” the surface of the stone contributes to the figure’s elemental strength.

Stone sculpture is unique in this. It allows both the artist and the viewer the illusion that somehow the figure is an expression of the spirit inside the rock. This is why so many sculptors since Michaelangelo (who thought painting an inferior craft to sculpture) have felt that they sought to free the figure already in the stone.

Muzondo has set quite a few of them free.