Mechanics

Monumentality is rarely a matter of scale. What makes a work of art monumental – and I believe that the work of Michael Estes Taylor reaches the status- is a kind of rampant ambition, a sense of artist’s palpable desire to pit issues against one another, and, and a willingness to risk everything in pursuit of an ideal. The sculptures of Michael Taylor are many things - beautiful and absorbing, bold and mesmerizing dynamic and riveting. But what I respond to most is that always seem victorious, that in them Taylor has somehow managed to win a sculptural triumph in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. After all these sculptures shouldn’t work. They try to do so much and their architecture, their color, their forms, their silhouette, their optics, their accretion, their geometry, in all their complex components, they just shouldn’t hold up. They should collapse under the weight of their own ambition. And yet do hold up, they do work no matter how many elements Taylor piles on he manages to bring them all to a solution, to an arrival that seems pertinent and inevitable. (Michael E Taylor, A Retrospective, Habatat Galleries, Boca Raton, FL) 5. James Yood, Critic, Art theorist, Professor, Northwestern University, Loyola University, Chicago Art Institute. 

- James Yood