JOSEPH GIOVANNINI

Abstract, intricately complex, and just plain beautiful. LAWRENCE HELLER'S geometric wall Constructions are fresh and original and yet deeply literate, echo chambers of artistic and architectural precedent reaching back deeply into the 20th century.  His three-dimensional Constructions recall Louise NEVELSON sculptures but also the architectons of Kasmir MALEVICH and the wall reliefs of his supremacist colleage El LISSITZKI.  They are wall pieces, but they break out of the plane of the wall into the space of the viewer in reversals of perspective, projecting rather then receding in a narrative of spacial depth.  With the kaleidoscopic intricacy of Islamic decorative patterning, the Constructions engage the mind by captivating the eye.  The modernist vocabulary of circles, triangles, squares and lines leads above beyond and through itself in layered spatial tapestries.  The pieces are contemplative despite the physicality of their craft and their cool geometric impulse.  Though trained as an architect, Mr. HELLER works like a composer inventing and reiterating themes, setting up rhythms that he sustains and then interrupts in silences of empty space.  The compositions are at once incomplet and resolved, the edges rough but the ethos refined.

His micro-environments are artistically considered works of utopian architecture.  Each is different version and vision of asymmetrical perfection.

JOSEPH GIOVANNINI 

New York & Los Angeles based architectural critic and  Architect.