It cannot be doubted that Isaac Kahn’s sculpture presents itself to the viewer as an attractive, enthralling and, in a certain sense, moral plastic expression. His works display formal aspects which necessarily recall Cubism: not that of Picasso, Braque and their fel- lows so much as those geometrical elements which, in theory, have been so important for many artists. The forms are placed in space but, while miming human movements, in fact behave like automatons, hinged at the joints and caught grace and sweetness.

Kahn’s creative impetus is most fully shown in his sculpture, the medium which is most naturally and intimately his. In three dimen- sions he can show how effortlessly yet how exactly he can model, filling out his figures with curving and sinuous lines making them as light as air. If we exclude a few works of an over-rigid fixity, as in “Family” for example, the rest of his output shows acrobatic figu- res daringly hung in space, amazingly held up by minimal parts of the body.

“Invention, movement, rhythm, colouristic vivacity are not – writes Jean Pierre Jouvet in the catalogue entry – the separate elements of a heterogeneous composition but are, ragher, an allegorical conti- nuum which corresponds to the basic problem handled by Kahn: to make subjects themselves vibrate”, subjects modelled on the circu- larity of a plastic line pushed to the extremes of balance and ten- sion.

poses suggesting Kahn, for whom the figure is the basic element even when working within the sphere of abstraction, can only create his volumes from the outlines of the human figure, from transfigured anatomical parts of bodies suspended delicately in space. His thought and inspiration is the female body which has in his work the fundamen- tal and perhaps obsessive role of inspiring sculptural forms which he may even deform, but which are always the exaltation of the delichts of the female anatomy.

Giorgio Trevisan