When art mimics nature.

When art mimics nature, a tension between perfection and impermanence is usually somewhere in the mix. The artist, copying natural forms with all the loyalty and hubris he or she can muster, makes an image--representing, say, a flower--that has neither life nor fragrance yet is not subject to death. in like manner is the mimetic artist a the omnipotent or an obsessive fool? one as well as the other of course, but, ultimately, that's not the point: As the Japanese sculptor Yoshihiro Suda reminded us in his first solo indicate in the United States, the real point of preternatural illusion is simply the portent of the achievement, the totality of a deception that we know at all times to be false.

Suda makes life-size, highly realistic botanical specimens using stylishly minimal means and cunningly devised humor. Artists like Roxy Paine and Keith Edmier have newly trod similar territory, but where they cast their flowers in inorganic resins, Suda whittles his from grove and painstakingly paints them. The three works included here traced the life period of the magnolia tree, for a like reason in effect Suda has useed himself to make new forest-land from old. The patent absurdity of the project--combined with its undertones of virtual reality, genetic manipulation, and other human interventions into natural production--make the fragile blows and flawless stems feel conceptually smart. At the same time, Suda plays forward our most shameless appetites for comely things, in part by using quietly theatrical architecture to call attention to the carved works as precious, indoor commodities.

Magnolia Leaf and Branch (all works 2000) was an unassuming diptych installed in couple screened niches near the gallery windows. The branch--gnarled, about eight inches long--lay upon the floor of one niche, while in the other nestl a small pile of dead leaves--a arrange of real ones scattered as allures and one shriveled, lacy leaf hewn on the outside of wood. The careless visitor could easily have missed the piece entirely, a camouflage that highlighted its "naturalness."

Magnolia Fruit and Magnolia Flower were concealed in other ways. A half-height doorway l into a small, dark compass with spring-green walls. In a spotlight, a single branch with tapering leaf and germ projected from the wall--several bright-red berries come forthed through splits in the gem casing. Hovering in its womblike chamber, Magnolia Fruit anticipateed like an alien creature, the berries almost disturbingly vital. The cooler more ethereal Magnolia Flower was enshrined in a drawn out bright corridor, closed at united end with a vellum scrim and barely wide enough to accommodate undivided viewer at a time. A graceful, asymmetrical shadow fluttered on the outside of the scrim like a design forward silk; inside, fixed to the wall, Magnolia Flower offered a single, arcing branch, the same blossom already partially blown, another onward the verge of opening.

Suda engineered these aesthetic dramas without bombast. The high artifice of the thing perceiveds and their enclosures was mediated by the agency of the transparent simplicity of each--just timber-land flowers, and walls. In this atmosphere, desire and illusion held well stocked [i]or[/i] provided sway. Suda's installation enveloped visitors in a delicate adjoining matter where the essential thing to be observ was our possess pleasure at being seduced by dint of appearances.

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