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Nelson makes soft things hard. Cheerios, baby milk bottle nipples,
hot dogs, shirts, plastic garbage bags,
and toilet paper
are fashioned by him out of Italian marble. When they are life-size
like the rolls of toilet paper, they are effective trompe l’oeil.
He used fine Carrara marble for this subject, counting on its vein-free
purity to sustain the illusion. A very natural looking slight sag
to the whole roll, and slight protrusion on one side to indicate
the start of the roll, the faint perforations, and the occasional
soft crease work to perfect it.
Since
1971 Nelson has been carving HOLOS, Greek for whole, which
are perfect three-dimensional illusions, some
as small as a cork
or an aspirin, others as big as a fully stuffed Hefty two-ply
garbage bag. Hermetically inexpressive, and obsessively repeated
in a series of six or eight, each chosen subject – Wonder
bread, sink stoppers, tea bags or folding chairs – has
no intrinsic value nor significance. They are ciphers for the
unimportance of material things and the supreme value of observation.
Perfectionism in the service of banality from an artist wielding
a diamond-tipped dental drill with Michelangelo’s Pietà on
the studio wall.
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