Stephen Lewis British, b. 1959

Stephen Lewis

Cézanne claimed that it had taken him forty years to discover that painting was not sculpture. What he was acknowledging was the reconciliation of the two-dimensionality of the picture plane with spatial sensation, without recourse to mimetic space.

Spatial concerns for sculpture are different; the work is at once in competition with real space. The challenge lies in making work which generates its own space through visual tension between its component parts. Stephen Lewis’s work, mostly in welded steel, relies solely on draughtsmanship to do just that; he can join two bits of metal together to look as though they had been drawn in space. Composed in the round, found metal objects are sometimes incorporated, their identity subsumed into a new statement.

There is more. This work is distinctly its own and distinctly humanist. Quite ponderous elements may surprisingly unite with soft looking curvaceous swathings. The edges of repeated vertical planes may echo each other, be off-set by unexpected disc-like forms or oblique ‘metal pencil strokes in the air’.

These works never look contrived, are simultaneously generous and economical. And they never try to beat you over the head with insistence. Rare qualities indeed.

Cuillin Bantock

February 2022