Madonna As Child

These infantilized female art icons may pull you up short.

Judy Fox: prefeminine

Gallery Joe, 304 Arch St., through Jan. 4 (592-7752).

Stepping from a damp overcast afternoon into the even brightness of Gallery Joe, one experiences the fleeting unsettling impression of children cavorting on the grey carpet, naked in the warmth. But the illusion is brief. One immediately recognizes that this rosy flesh is too too solid.

These are four life-size terracotta or, in one case, cast hydrocal sculptures by Judy Fox: Olympia, Delilah, the Chinese Courtesan, and the Virgin Mary. The mythic "prefeminine" types seemingly range in age from about 2 years to about 7. They are perfect little doll-babies, with dimpled elbows, plump pillows of fat on thighs and cheeks, tiny fingers, velvety casein-blushed skin and painted eyebrows and hair. They stand, sit or recline unmediated by pedestal or label, but they are not Duane Hanson illusions intended to delude the viewer. It is their unnaturalness that is so striking.

It's obvious that there's something oddly inappropriate about the postures and facial expressions of these children. The Olympia is perhaps the most recognizably child-version of a specific work of art. With her pink hair bow (no velvet ribbon around her neck, though), carefully crossed legs and fathomless stare, she perfectly mimics Manet's famous painting. The Courtesan, whose coquettish posture is borrowed from ancient tomb figures, gestures delicately as no child would, yet her childish toes believably grip the ground, a detail not borrowed from the simplified tomb figures. We have to bend to see a face which is realistically modeled. It is based on pornographic Chinese figurines, but not made in the convention of these figurines, just as Fox's Olympia is not painted in the style of Manet.

These little girls prefigure the actions of their imaginary adult personas, plunging us into a contraction and dilation of time encompassing not only the life span of individuals, but the meaning of personality as it is embodied in art. How curious it is to see the Virgin Mary (a work which has been purchased by Demi Moore) posed as she will appear in adulthood, the exemplar of submission and modesty.

Fox is certainly not prompting us to sentimentalize about a young girl experiencing intimations of her sublime future as the mother of God, or of her painful fate as the mother of a son who is tortured and killed. Fox, rather, juxtaposes these future (mythic) realities in a jarring denial of the intervening time period. One reading could project the child within us as eternally embodied in an archetypical moment of adulthood. Or, more startlingly, the adult mythos as embodied within the child.

But these sculptures are also very much about being looked at. They are not humans posed "naturally" like wildlife in a diorama; each has self-consciousness as a work of art. Olympia, the painting, looks out of the canvas into our eyes, but this Olympia lies at our feet, her casual covering gesture somehow exposed as an obscene convention. The Virgin, whose swelling abdomen is both naturalistic and suggestive of the nurturing womb, lowers her eyelids.

By placing these figures among us on the floor, Fox challenges their artful self-consciousness and forces us into a new consciousness of our own relationship to their prototypes as works of art. To see the Virgin's eyes or Delilah's profile, we must kneel. Fox does not make it easy for us as did the artists did in bygone centuries.

Fox is a trained art historian. Her meticulous attention to details, such as the slightly darkened complexion of the Virgin in accordance with earlier artistic convention, demonstrates a level of information not available to most gallery visitors. But this scholarship, though fascinating, is not necessary to a real appreciation of Fox's work. In a visceral way, she confronts us with the weight of centuries of cultural and aesthetic convention. She re-introduces us to the past and to its reflections in our own self-vision.

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Two recently closed shows are worthy of note.

Selected work remains on view from Wayne Higby's porcelain show at Helen Drutt, a change of direction for an artist who is widely known for his rugged earth-toned pots based on the landscape of the Western United States. Higby chooses not to approach porcelain with the refined precision of classic Chinese ceramics; he breaks the rules and fires solid chunks of clay 6 to 8 inches thick. Subjecting clay this thick to the intense heat of the kiln is something like accelerating certain geological and weathering stresses on rock: the clay explodes, fractures and chips. What remains is glazed by the artist and fired again, preserving and elaborating on chance processes.

The current body of work is a series of relief images on flat, vertically presented slabs of clay. All the sculptural action of tears, cleavages and irregular facets is engaging as one approaches the work, but the real interest is the subtle ridged design — inspired by the flooded canyon of Lake Powell, UT — which rises beneath the dense glaze like a network of blood vessels beneath the skin.

Higby's fugue-like interweaving of textures suggests on the one hand the drama of clouds and rain, waterfalls and rocks. Or perhaps he is saying that raw nature may become only a memory, a delicate image embedded in a wounded fragment.

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Anton van Dalen, recently at Temple's Tyler Gallery, was born in Holland but has lived in New York City since 1968. A few paintings from the '80s seemed overstated and simplistically allegorical in comparison to the artist's more laconic, yet richer work since 1990. His stencil-based signs have the character of language, including subtle shades of meaning which vary with context and, to some extent, color. Cars, trucks, humans, dogs, plants and several varieties of birds are in van Dalen's vocabulary. They may appear in site-specific contexts or individually on mounted cards which can be arranged in a variety of configurations.

Van Dalen's flat, often harsh images grapple with inhumanity and harshness in the contemporary urban environment. The antiseptic mechanical character of international signs (a familiar example is the "no smoking" sign) is echoed in van Dalen's signs with a curious pathos — as if human life had been snuffed out or frozen by some Vesuvian cataclysm. Yet his work has a poetic and hopeful grace.