Large Charcoal and Vermilion Pastel Drawing by John Monti

John Monti (1957-) is one of the upcoming “undiscovered” artists of his generation. This piece, dated 1987, belongs to his early period.

John Monti has exhibited regularly in New York since the mid-1980s. Against a fluctuating backdrop of stylistic convulsion he has single-mindedly pursued his own ideas.

Monti’s work is ingeniously devised and fabricated. His earliest wood sculptures, suggesting unlikely mergers of Constructivism and West African ethnographic objects, displayed joinery worthy of a piano builder or luthier. The artist’s later, soft-edge Neo-Minimalist work–which hung off walls and flattened onto floors–recruited Industrial ingredients (rubber and fiberglass) and similarly pushed the inherent limits of its materials.

His exhibition at Elizabeth Harris raised the technical bar. The scrupulous fabrication of the low-relief wall ensembles in this show approaches the perverse. Drawing from manufactured consumer products, the painstakingly handmade components are all but indistinguishable from machine-made objects.