ABSTRACT

Ernest Trova is exhibiting his new sculpture at the Pace Gallery. As befits an artist currently enjoying a huge success, the exhibition is a large one. The figure that serves as Mr. Trova's all-purpose symbol is generally observed in some relation to machinery. The relation is ambiguous, however; perhaps deliberately so. There is, then, a large element of the Futurist in Mr. Trova's sensibility. Indeed, his work stands in relation to de Kooning, Dubuffet, and Bacon very much as Futurism stands in relation to German Expressionism. Artists like Mr. Trova no longer suffer such handicaps. Though he began, in the fifties, as an Expressionist painter, there is no longer any trace of the atelier tradition in his art. Mr. Trova's affinities are, alas, with sentiments of a more meretricious order. Whereas Boccioni's dilemma was tragic, edifying, and somehow heroic, Mr. Trova's is only pathetic.