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conspicuously alike, pose like a family – father, mother, and the
smallest child. Human presence is also clearly implied by the
organic shape that stands in front of the pedestal in For Those (1998).
This piece is a touching monument to the failure of humanity in our
times: the absence of a recognizable human figure says as much.
There are no adequate
human models to
look up to, hence the amorphous humanity of the expectant figure
waiting for one.
But what makes Warwick’s abstractions suggestively human is his
ingenious use of a mirror. It puts the viewer and the work in the
same frame by reflecting both. It makes the work uncanny even as it
draws the viewer into it, establishing an intimacy of sorts.
Moreover, the mirror is an age-old symbol of that other world, the
unconscious. It adds an introspective dimension by displacing us
into another world – a magical space, like ours but unreachable.
For Swedenborg, each of us has a mirror-image that exists in heaven,
and for Cocteau the mirror was a realm unto itself, only more
unpredictable. Warwick’s doubling of his rigorously
abstract sculptures confirms their inner subjective meaning, which
becomes explicit in their mirror.
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