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There is always something ominous about Segal's images; no American sculptor today runs his work closer to theater. The theatricality becomes particularly intense in his painted sculptures, where the coating of figures with primary red, yellow or blue gives them a ferocious visual punch while rendering them, in Segal's words, "more like abstract shafts of color." To take the colors associated with the most rigorous abstractionists of 20th century art — Mondrian and Barnett Newman — and use them in a piece like The Costume Party, begun in 1965, has a perverse aspect.
The narrative of the sculpture remains opaque (what is a figure of Ian Fleming's Pussy Galore in a bike helmet doing in the same place as the donkey-headed Bottom from Midsummer Night's Dream?), but its intention is plain — to provoke a sense, as Segal puts it, of "terror, hallucination, nightmare."
Strong feeling does not necessarily make strong art, and Segal's tableaux might remain in the category of dramatic curiosities but for one quality: his laconic Tightness of arrangement. "In his use of space," one of the catalogue essays rather absurdly claims, "Segal is close to the minimalists," because, apparently, "Segal's figures energize their spaces." (And what sculpture, minimal or other, does not?) Nevertheless, Segal knows exactly how much distance to allot between one figure and another, how much emptiness should come between a silhouette in a bar and the profile of a metal letter, and how to maintain a kind of iconic austerity in an impure medium that could easily become cluttered with props and set dressing. Segal is no formalist, but his sense of the abstract underpinning of sculpture cuts down on what might otherwise have become a tough-but-tender street sentimentality. He is, as the catalogue suggests, a "proletarian mythmaker," though not in a political sense; and no other sculptor working in America today has done more to revive the human figure as a subject.