Marisol

Marisol Escobar--or Marisol, as she is known professionally--studied under the noted abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann, and, she says dryly, "I painted like a Hofmann student." But though she learned much from her master, he was quickly supplanted by a series of happenstance influences that sent Marisol off on a strange and appealing tangent of her own. In a friend's house, for instance, she saw some small Mexican boxes filled with hand-carved painted figures, and she was enchanted. In another house, she was drawn to an old-fashioned coffee grinder that had the shape of a human figure. Finally, in a third house, she saw a bunch of "old hat forms--you know, like big heads."

And so Marisol began making boxes filled with small figures; then she constructed some people, starting out with old hat forms. Today she is famous-- sought after by collectors and currently featured in a group show at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. That sort of accolade can mean much or little these days, but in Marisol's case, the applause is for more than mere novelty.

Push-&-Pull. Born in Paris of Venezuelan parents, Marisol is a black-haired, wide-eyed, unmarried woman of 33 who speaks in monosyllabic whispers so faint that by comparison Jackie Kennedy would sound like a cheerleader. She works in wood--logs, barrels and planks that she saws apart and nails together. At times her figures seem to be little more than crude painted cutouts; but their oddball incompleteness and the way painted surfaces suddenly and spontaneously emerge into sculpted forms are meticulously planned. Three dimensions sink into two; two grow into three in a sort of Marisol version of Hans Hofmann's theory of push-and-pull. Marisol's greatest ally is the power of free association. A pair of hands suggests arms that do not exist; the imaginary arms, in turn, suggest a body.

Some critics have seen in Marisol' sculptures the work of a satirist, but whatever social comment may be inferred is almost always accidental. "I'm thinking only about art and shapes," say Marisol. "If there is social comment, it seems to come out by itself." A sculpture called The Generals, in which two officers, who vaguely resemble Napoleonic marshals, sit astride the same horse, did not start out as a poke at the military. Marisol, it seems, was doing a sculpture of a friend, using a barrel for the torso, when she realized that if she tipped the barrel sideways she could have the torso of a horse. Legs and head were added, and then the two generals in all their epauletted splendor.

Out of a Cocoon. A beam whose upper half had been partially cut away reminded Marisol of the Mona Lisa: as she examined the grain of the cutaway part, she thought she saw the famous smile. She painted in the face, guided by the grain, and added a pair of plaster hands around the middle of the beam. The result looks as if the Mona Lisa were about to emerge from some sort of wooden cocoon.

Marisol is quite solemn about her work, but somewhere in her mind is a sparkling reservoir of wit and an ability to phantasize that is as rich as a child's. Her art is that of the toymaker, whose creations are specifically designed to appeal to that part of the mind in which fantasy and reality seem identical. The only difference is that a toy can be outgrown; it seems doubtful that the same will soon be said of the work of Marisol.

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