Viola Frey vs. Adrian Arleo

Viola Frey vs. Adrian Arleo

Viola Frey was a sculptor and creator of ceramic art with a profoundly feminist orientation. Her works were frequently large, bold, and colorful, or large, white, and deliberately rough in their texture and appearance, such as "Two Women and a World." The figures she created over her career were characteristically large, lumbering, and monumental in their scope and scale. However, quite often her women and men seemed emotional, even defeated, and rather than attempting to overpower the gazer, they invited compassion as well as awe. "Indeed, the gigantism of these lumbering men and women -- their scale is extraordinary among figurative ceramics -- amplifies the symbolic frailties with which they have been invested. Although the figures are unmistakably American in appearance, their titles suggest general existential conditions." (Gilmore, 2003) Frey's work was both archaic in its scale and static quality, yet modern in its themes of alienation, and her focus was always on the body.

The sculptor Adrian Arleo, crafter of the work "Creating Darkness Between Light" is feminist in her ideological orientation like Frey, but on a more intimate scale. Unlike Frey, Arleo states: "it is the face that most intrigues and challenges me. During the twenty years that I've worked with the figure, the faces have moved steadily from vagueness toward increasing specificity and recognizability. The eyes, when I was starting out, were undefined; they have since evolved from being closed, to being downward turned, to being open and forthrightly gazing."(Arleo, 2006) Arleo's sculptures, often also in clay, are more human in their scope and their appearance, and invite a kind of intimacy between gazer and crafted work.