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Works like Ouranos are infused with a sense of primal material under the stress of becoming, a mass raising itself up into consciousness even as gravity drags it down. You think of Genesis and the lump of clay just on the point of turning into Adam (the first sculpture of all). A little less thought, less work, and they would only be lumps. Tucker had taken a long look at Rodin, and it shows everywhere on his bronzes. The heavings and incrustations of their skins are, in fact, exquisitely organized to carry the eye around the form and leave no dead or slick patches on the surface. Groping, malleability, squeezing, thumbing bespeak a flat-out commitment to the tactile.
The biggest of the pieces, and Tucker's masterpiece so far, is Okeanos, 1987-88. It packs three layers of imagery into its mass without the slightest strain or theatricality. At first it is a great bowed head and shoulders, rearing up from the earth and leaning forward. Its immense back carries memories of Matisse's bronze backs, and its pose refers, distantly, to Brancusi's Mlle. Pogany. Then, from the side, one notices how it resembles a big wave about to topple -- the ocean over which the deity ruled. And finally, from the front, closer in, the deep pits and bosses in the surface suggest a rock carved at random by the swilling of that sea. It is a work of astonishing power and distinction.
Of the season's shows in Manhattan, one that was unaccountably ignored by critics is Xavier Corbero's at the BlumHelman Warehouse (through June 11). At 53, Corbero, a Catalan who lives in Barcelona, is one of the best though most idiosyncratic sculptors in Europe; his show, "The Catalan Opening," contains work of such metaphorical richness, variety and wit that one would need to be an aesthetic pruneface not to enjoy it.
The Catalan opening is, of course, a chess gambit. Corbero's exhibition is a set of 16 black chess pieces -- king and queen, hulking monoliths more than 9 1/2 ft. high, and a whimsical army of knights, bishops, rooks and pawns, all carved and constructed from basalt. This brittle volcanic rock is too hard to chisel cleanly; it can only be sawed or broken like a flint. Corbero revels in the risks of breaking it. Each piece of basalt becomes a found object -- altered, but bearing a memory of the raw look it had in the quarry.
The set is not just Catalan in name. It prolongs the spirit of older Barcelonan artists and architects, a sense of material fantasy that still saturates the place and gives Corbero's work its sardonic, free-associating air and its obsessively fine craftsmanship. There are delicious Miroesque touches in this show, like the comb jauntily set on the queen's head, grooved with the bars of the Catalan shield, or the wacky little pyramid that balances on the needle peak of a pawn called Miss Capicua, 1987-88. Other details resurrect the images of heraldic encounter, the dungeons and dragons that lie within the shapes of chessmen. Loving the double image, Corbero is part heir to Catalan surrealism. The son and grandson of metalsmiths, he sometimes gets a bit overrefined for American taste, but his delight in odd tropes -- like making forms in basalt that conventionally would be done in metal -- has its ! own authentic motives. He remains a very considerable sculptor.