Alan Chimacoff, Buona Serra: Steel

Unexpected colors and patterns are locked within the depths of steel, waiting to be teased out—immutable imprints of the process of manufacture and forming of red-hot steel.

And, while these embedded, deep-structured appearances are strictly an inside job, the surfaces of steel bear the scars and tokens of external affairs and encounters—mill scale, striated cuts, oxidized, weather-discolored scuffs, scrapes and impacts of storage and movement of steel elements from steelyard to location.

Ironically, for steel seems so hard-hearted and unforgiving, the abstract images are surprisingly lyrical and highly emotive, evoking both natural and constructed scenes, landscapes and seascapes, prehistoric civilizations, the violence of creation or explosive destructions, the serenity of a field of poppies…all interpreted in the mind and the eye of the beholder.

These images are of the raw steel surfaces of Richard Serra’s installations in Gagosian Gallery in New York in 2013—enormous slabs and blocks of steel weighing as much as 20 tons each. The prints are flatbed inkjet on Dibond—a 1/8” thick sandwich of thin aluminum sheets bonded to a rigid vinyl core.