As early as high school, DeWain Valentine could be found testing the potential of fiberglass in his family’s oven, drawn to the project of shaping, refining, and polishing forms. Later inspired to move to Los Angeles by the work of fellow Finish Fetish artists, he taught a course on plastics at UCLA and collaborated with a chemical engineer to develop a method of casting large solid volumes in polyester resin. Most of Valentine’s resin sculptures required a four- or five-step process. First, a mock-up of the sculpture was shaped, usually from light polyurethane foam. The mock-up became a pattern, coated in fiberglass or plastic. When the coating set and was removed from the pattern, the mold that resulted was used to cast the sculpture with pigmented liquid resin. Removed from the mold, the final piece was sanded and polished to a high sheen. Valentine prized a pristine surface, and though his sculptures are heavy, they appear elegantly balanced, even weightless. Richly colored resin works like Ring Gray seem both to absorb and to radiate light, inviting us into what the artist calls the sculpture’s “transparent colored space.”
The Brooklyn Rail | May 2019 | In Conversation
