Opinion: A Small Forest Of Brooding Yet Witty Works Slim black sculptures form a centerpiece at Arlene Bujese

By Robert Long

Twenty of Jonathan Thomas's totemlike black sculptures, arranged as in a class portrait, with the tall ones in back and short ones up front, greet, or confront, those who enter the Arlene Bujese Gallery in East Hampton. It is a welcome encounter, for they are brooding and witty works that seem utterly contemporary even as they pay tribute to tribal Africa.

The sculptures, all from a series called "Fragments" that Mr. Thomas, who died this year, made between 1997 and 1999, are just a few inches wide and range in height from 33 inches to six feet; they resemble in contour skateboards or skis, depending on their height, and their texture even brings to mind very large emery boards.

They are made of sculpted paper pulp on flat wooden backings, and are painted flat black, with inserted bits of wood, rope, and metal, and each is raised above a neat little square metal base by a thin metal rod, in the manner of a traffic sign.

Mr. Thomas shaped the paper pulp manually, so each piece has a handmade look. There are regularly spaced mounds of pulp along the length of each sculpture, so it is as if they are pregnant, and those little bellies contain symmetrical arrangements of objects such as washers, dowels, rope. Each piece seems to have several "faces"; there are suggestions of human features but more often it is as if we are in the presence of idols.

Like Louise Nevelson, whose influence hovers subtly in the air, Mr. Thomas plays down the intricacy of his imagery with black paint; its richness sneaks up on you, and so does his wit. Some of the works have hair, in the form of a few strands of unruly rope, and some seem to frown at us; others have twirly moustaches like cartoon villains. The wit and the elegance of the "Fragments" have much to do with their formality. They are grave and playful, with an unmistakable presence that is made all the more memorable by this multiple installation.

The Thomas sculptures are the centerpiece of an exhibit of works made with or on paper by about two dozen of Ms. Bujese's artists, and the show is dedicated to his memory. There are some real stunners, including a Mary Abbott collage, undated but from the 1950s, that looks a lot like something de Kooning might have made at the time, only without the woman in it, and with a lot more white space. The artist chopped up and reassembled a drawing in such a manner that geometrical red shapes seem to be flying beyond the frame; this "Farrago," as it is known, has an elemental force and is beautiful besides.

Gerson Lieber has imposed childlike outlines of houses onto Cezanne-like forests of color in two watercolors that force the viewer to focus in two different ways. An untitled oil on paper by John Little, painted in 1961, is a sunny pastoral abstraction with a lot of activity in its jostling forms, like a more hectic James Brooks.

De Kooning's influence is clear in Shari Abramson's four small square monotypes, each of which contains a group of shaky, scribbly gestures against a solid-colored ground of either orange or green. Ms. Abramson's line is like the one we see in the drawings of women that de Kooning made with his eyes shut. "No fear, but a lot of trembling," as the Kierkegaard-loving Dutchman once joked.

Josh Dayton, too, has been making monotypes lately, and in his four untitled pictures he balances wild ribbony shapes that fly across the paper with white space and congested brushy patches of color; these are landscapes that would be hospitable to Max Ernst's little friend Loplop.

Marcel Bally's two black and white photos of German road signs complement Mr. Thomas's sculptures; the signs have been pushed to the side of a road, with their backs to us, so our attention is drawn not to whatever they advise but to their shape: They are like a forest of metal poles, each pole planted, oddly, in an old car tire.

Calvin Albert, Carolyn Beegan, Stephanie Brody-Lederman, Deborah Black, Carol Hunt, Elaine de Kooning, Kryn Olson, Victor Elmaleh, Rachel Friedberg, Tom Wasik, Balcomb Greene, Alfonso Ossorio, Anne Sager, Dalton Portella, Betty Parsons, Alexander Russo, Walter Schwab, Roseann Schwab, and Pamela Topham also have works in the show, which can be seen through Oct. 10.