Someone ought to declare this “Jesus Moroles Month” in the Denver area, because the Rockport, Texas, sculptor seems to be everywhere.
For local art lovers, that is a very good thing. He happens to be one of this country’s finest sculptors, as two new presentations of his work make abundantly clear.
Moroles oversaw the design of the just-opened Carol and Don Dickinson Sculpture Garden at the Foothills Art Center in Golden and sculpted three 13-foot-tall granite columns as the $300,000 project’s permanent centerpiece.
Titled “Granite Aspens,” the slightly tapered pieces with flat tops look like sections of perfectly formed tree trunks, with wonderfully rough, irregular surfaces that echo the gnarly, textured bark of many trees, if not aspens.
Breaking the spell of this arboreal allusion are the precisely spaced, carved grooves that run top to bottom around these pieces, emphasizing their verticality and suggesting the incised flutes of more traditional architectural columns.
The clean, graceful and iconic form of these pieces gives them a powerful presence, which is enhanced by their carefully considered placement, following the soft contour of the slope from the garden’s plaza to the sidewalk.
One of the columns is a fountain. The water emerges at the top and gently falls down its sides and into a slotted stone base, bringing out the pink-and-gray patterns of the stone as it goes.
This trio of sculptures immediately join the ranks of some of the best public art in the metropolitan area and set a commendably high standard for the art center as it makes future additions to the garden’s sculptural holdings.
In creating a home for these pieces and the others to come, Moroles and his collaborator, Golden landscape architect Susan Saarinen, have created a relaxed, handsome space that lyrically combines man-made elements with nature.
The garden opens the formerly tree-shrouded corner at 15th Street and Washington Avenue, bringing together curved walkways and a stone-lined patio with strategically positioned trees – old and new – and other landscaping.
This urban oasis is sure to boost Foothills’ profile citywide and bring it heightened credibility and attention in Denver’s larger art community, where sometimes it is overlooked.
Moroles is most widely known for his monumental works like the columns, but in conjunction with the sculpture garden’s opening, Artyard has organized an exhibition of 11 of his equally compelling small sculptures.
He employs a complexity of means to achieve the stunning simplicity of these abstract pieces, which deal in fresh, forthright ways with such fundamental artistic elements as form, space and line.
Along with such repeated motifs as grids, carved grooves and pegs and peg holes, he has drawn considerable expressive power from the collisions of contradicting elements such as symmetry and asymmetry and smoothness and roughness.
Perhaps because of the large quantity of work that Moroles produces and shows in galleries around the country, an undesirable commercial quality sometimes seeps into his output. That is anything but the case in these 11 uniformly high-caliber pieces.
Among the highlights is “Interlocking,” an 18-inch-tall work consisting of two almost identical slabs of stone with dozens of interlocking notches that almost make the two angled sections look like they are hinged together, though they never actually touch.
This piece is even more impressive given the difficulty of carving granite because of its extreme hardness. Despite this challenge, Moroles has achieved an extraordinary intricacy, even gracefulness.
Also notable are “Black Columns,” which echoes the Foothills piece, and “Arc Core Playscape,” in which the weight of a stacked row of cylinders looks as though it is bending the shelf on which they rest.
This compact offering is, quite simply, one of the region’s best sculpture shows in recent memory.
Staff writer Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
“Jesus Moroles: Small Sculptures”
THROUGH OCT. 22|Granite sculpture exhibition|Artyard, 1251 S. Pearl St.|Free|1:30 p.m.-5:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays (303-777-3219 or artyardgallery.com)
Carol and Don Dickinson Sculpture Garden
PERMANENT|New $300,000 sculpture garden with three 13-foot-tall Moroles columns|Foothills Art Center, 809 15th St., Golden|Free|24 hours a day (303-279-3922 or foothillsartcenter.org)
