Mark Warwick’s abstract sculptures seem purely formal, but subliminally they are all too human. Communication (1998), for example, is ostensibly a study in contradictory forms and materials – angular steel and curvilinear stainless steel – but it suggests a tenuous human encounter. The material forms are at odds, but they connect at one place, as though feel out each other’s difference. Similarly, the three forms of Conflict (1998) touch just enough to complete the circuit between them, but their relationship remains tentative – more proposed than realized. Indeed, the insecurity of their relationship is conveyed by the eccentricity of the curve they form together. The family resemblance of the form makes the uncertainty of their connection all the more poignant.

Again and again we see Warwick proposing intimacy, then backing away from it, or not quite making it happen. On Egde (1998) is a superb example of such equivocation. A delicate balance, visual and spatial, is established between the forms, two of which are upright, one the horizontal connective – a balance that can be thrown off by the slightest change in position of any one of the elements. The sense of precarious balance – emotional as well as physical tension – is already evident in Advance and Small Voice (both 1996). Ostensibly constructivist, like all of Warwick’s works – even when the forms become more organic, as in the later work mentioned – they quintessentialize human relational issues in abstract form.

Warwick himself suggest as much in such gloomy urban drawings as People and Places (1996), New York (1997), and Industrial Building (1998). Clearly he wants to make public monuments, but he is acutely aware of the difficulty in giving abstract modernist means human meaning. Splendor and Curvature (1997) indicates this. It contrasts a traditional monument, incorporating human figures, with a monumental abstract form that seems arrogantly inhuman, which no doubt enhances its physical presence. He solves the problem by grouping his forms as though they were members of the same family, as in Reach (1997), Reflections, and For Those (both 1998). Indeed, the figures in Reflections, 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.