Sculpture: Merlin with Magnets

Sculpture must defy gravity, says Alberto Collie, and by using magnets he performs feats of levitation with objects made of aluminum, copper and magnesium. Though Collie’s magnetized sculptures do not soar with full air borne freedom, they do hover and float* above their pedestals, attached by almost imperceptible nylon strings. The effect is playful and magical-rather like Collie himself, who combines the hot-eyed zeal of a young Merlin with the twinkle-eyed grin of a boy with a toy. Collie, 25, calls his works spatial-absolutes: spatial because they are floating in space, absolute because “the true essence of a shape, its 100% value” can be fully experienced and appreciated only when it is lifted from its base.

Two sculptural shapes dominate Collie’s show at Manhattan’s Nordness Gallery. One is a tilted disk that looks like a model of a flying saucer. Such disks jiggle at a fingertip touch, but may weigh as much as 13 Ibs.—as a thief discovered when he tried to whisk one away from the Chrysler Art Museum, only to have it drop with a clang. The second, also a space-age motif, resembles the hollow cone of a missile. Inside, visible from both ends, are two metallic spheres, one hanging down like a tiny bathysphere on its nylon thread, and by its magnet attracting the magnet in another sphere that levitates upward, tethered by a thread. Each open end of the sculpture gives out a sound like a giant sea shell humming with the rhythm of breakers. If the viewer steps back a few paces, the interior spheres look like twin, lightless moons haunting the barren landscape of a science-fiction planet.

Collie’s spatial-absolutes represent a marriage of technology and art, but science is clearly the stronger partner. Yet Collie insists that he is no technological faddist catering to a novelty-hungry art public that is ready to pay $1,000 to $3,500 for his floating sculpture. In his obsession with simplicity and freedom of form, he argues that his shapes “derive from Brancusi. If he were alive today, he would have released his Bird in Space and freed the Fish to swim. He simply lacked the technology that we have today. His work implies flight.” Collie promises to fly even higher in his next show: no strings.

* Using the principle that identical magnetic poles (two norths or two souths) repel each other. Collie embeds light, powerful ceramic magnets in the floating and fixed elements of his sculptures, which are themselves made of light, nonmagnetic metals.