While Claudia Comte’s solo debut at Barbara Gladstone demonstrates her talent for handsome installation, the young Swiss artist gets bogged down in style quotes. She begins by covering the walls in yellow stripes, a pattern similar to one used by Sylvie Fleury two years ago at Salon 94—a show that itself was channeling the work of French Conceptualist Daniel Buren.
Comte doesn’t stop there. She divvies up the space with burnt-wood partitions, incised with wavering vertical lines that bring to mind Frank Stella’s Black Paintings. These are hung with bar-shaped panels, stacked one above the other in a manner recalling Donald Judd’s ascending columns of boxes. They’re also fronted by organically abstract wooden sculptures that cheekily revamp everyone from Constantin Brancusi to Barbara Hepworth. One resembles a cat climbing a post.
Comte uses the gallery’s high ceiling to maximum effect, creating an immersive environment that’s both vivid and subtle. The sculptures are mounted on benchlike pedestals cut from the aforementioned dividers. Jutting out into the room, they leave voids that set off or frame the objects in a seamless interface of art and display.
Missing in all of this is Comte’s artistic individuality. Her sense of humor is apparent, and some, if not enough, of her sensibility comes through in the handworked quality of the sculptures and the wonky imperfection of the partitions. But mostly her piece is a hit parade of art-historical references, absent an argument for their appropriation. The unsatisfying takeaway is formalist arrangement of pattern, color and shape.—Merrily Kerr