His Private Language

Dan Zaretsky studied sculpture with Rudy Lehman. As a sculptor, Zaretsky learned bronze casting which helped him in the field of his art. He learned to take advantage of the lesser known possibilities inherent in bronze sculpture; here, Zaretsky has unique accomplishments.
Zaretsky is a figurative sculptor who has a private language. It seems to me that his private language is drawn from ancient Assyrian sculpture, which was mainly the art of relief. Zaretsky creates sculptures in bronze that are extremely thin-but they are, nonetheless, very, very three dimensional. Here, there is a mutual understanding between the art of sculpture, and the art of relief. In bas-relief, figures are sculpted on a tablet of stone, wood, or other material, and the figures cast shadows and create the illusion of three dimensions. In haut-relief, perspective is also created. What Zaretsky accomplishes, and in my opinion he is the first to do so, at least for us here, is to create a sculpture that is so very thin that it is a deep relief, on both its sides.(more...)