Henry Lautz

...Henry Lautz is the author of a series of pieces who references are found in the past. A past so far away as the Paleolithic and Neolithic where Henry Lautz discovers our ability to create forms invested with our own emotional context. That affinity of the sculptor with the primitive forms enables him to create his own formal poetry that in some cases suggests the “Lingam” of Indian culture. The sculptures of Henry Lautz are made of skillfully polished polychromatic woods that give us the same sense of silence and cleanliness as the works of Jean Arp. However, what the ensemble demonstrates is the dexterity of expression that penetrates the arcane of other epochs and reincorporates it into our present time. That is the root of his works’ attraction as well as the enigma conserved within its forms...

...Henry Lautz es el autor de una serie de piezas cuyas referencias se encuentran por lo tanto en el pasado. Un pasado tan lejano como el Paleolítico y el Neolítico donde Henry Lautz descubre nuestra habilidad de crear formas investidas de un contenido emocional, según declaración propia. Esa afinidad del escultor con las creaciones primitivas, lo conduce a crear su propia poesía formal, que en algunos casos nos sugieren los "Lingam" de la cultura india. Las esculturas de Henry Lautz están confeccionadas con maderas policromadas y hábilmente pulidas, que nos dan la misma sensación de silencio y limpieza que las obras de Jean Arp. Pero lo que el conjunto demuestra es la destreza de una mirada que penetra en los arcanos de otras épocas para reincorporarlos a la nuestra. Ahí radica el atractivo de su obra y el enigma que conservan detrás de sus formas...

   Some know Henry Lautz as a photographer who, in the 1970s, exhibited in galleries in Texas, New Mexico and California. Others think of him as a furniture maker, a master of traditional Chinese joinery and Ming-inspired designs. But Henry Lautz today is an artist who, bringing his accumulated experience to bear, asks universal questions about man’s responses to art.
   For decades, Lautz had been fascinated with the stone-carved tools our ancestors used 50,000 to 100,000 years ago to hunt for their food, clothe their bodies and build their fires, but he didn't know why. Then, some five years ago, he picked up a scrap of wood and began to whittle. " It all came together," he says, standing in his workshop in Atlanta amid mammoth planes and joiners and a sweet-smelling carpet of wood shavings.

   Wood has been a part of Lautz's life since, at the age of 5, a great uncle taught him to carve toys. So it's not surprising that it was through the act of sculpting that he glimpsed what attracted him to prehistoric artifacts. It was very simply the way they fit the hand.

   The sculptures that have grown out of this epiphany are far too large to handle and their edges too blunt to scrape hides, so most viewers never make the connection between them and stone tools. Not consciously, at least. When I first saw his earliest work, Lautz had said nothing about it. "Neolithoid #1" was some four feet high, squarish, black and spare. I immediately associated it with modernist sculptures. Its corners, however, were rounded, its sides canted ever so slightly inward, and scratchings in the black paint traced faint circles around a thin, horizontal cleft. Its massive, dynamic presence held me, and the thin opening, hinting at the mysteries of an unseen beyond, drew me in.

   "There's something," I said, somewhat rattled, "very old about this." Lautz's face lit up. A man seldom at a loss for words, he beamed in silence.

   Nor is my reaction unique. When owner Barrie Mowatt of the Buschlen Mowatt Gallery (Vancouver, Canada, and Palm Desert, Calif.) first saw Lautz's pieces at the Elaine Baker Gallery in Boca Raton, Fla., he was taken by the sense of power and strength in a material one would not expect it of. "They were," Mowatt adds, "instantly appealing and stuck in my head."

   This is the kind of response Lautz seeks in himself, and it is the key to his creative process. As he sorts through his growing collection of stone tool images– he has folders filled with photos clipped from books and magazines, images downloaded from the Internet, sketches he has drawn in museums– Lautz looks for those to which he most viscerally responds. These he sketches in a notebook, revisiting them periodically to gauge again his reaction. Like love, he cannot describe it with precision but knows it when he feels it. " It's as if this is where the external feeling of the object and my own internal feelings meet," he says slowly. "It's the kind of thing that gets iffy to talk about."

   He starts with foot-high maquettes in wood, which allow him to re-examine his responses to the form and to test how he will paint it. "I dearly love color,"he explains, "but it comes with too much meaning. So that leaves black and white." More precisely, gray-tinted whites and blacks made of layering thin black washes over barn-reds and greens, a technique derived from studying Mark Rothko's paintings.

   Lautz then takes large pieces of basswood and draws the outline with broad, loose gestures so that the final result owes as much to the natural movement of his arm as to the original stone tool. He pays equal attention to volume: some pieces swell at the base what would be the handle and thin at the edge, while others thicken in the center, giving them the mass an ax needs to be effective.

   Where Lautz most departs from his models is in the way he works the surfaces. Or does he? On "Neolithoid #6," he carved parallel grooves. On "Neolithoid #9," he scooped out a large hole. And on "Lithoid #26," he roughened the edge around a small central hole. But just as he thinks he is wandering into new territory, he comes across a prehistoric tool that has the same, or similar, markings. " I get such a strange feeling," he says, shaking his head and laughing.

   Ultimately, however, Lautz feels more validated than surprised. "Since man has lived with these shapes for many hundreds of thousands of years," he says, " I think there might be an imprint of some kind on our brain." Could it be, he asks, that " feeling good to the hand, feeling good emotionally and looking good are somehow all bundled? That we get a feeling of comfortableness from these shapes? " Shapes that, after all, allowed early man to survive in a harsh, predator-rich environment.

   The more he works with these forms, the more he believes that beauty preceded function. Our ancestors, he speculates, might have first picked up a pretty stone and later, confronted with a nut that needed cracking or a bark that needed scraping, turned it into a useful tool. Lautz smiles. " It is nice," he says, " to think that aesthetics may have come first."