Hewicker’s Art Under Foot
by Kenneth Baker
San Francisco Chronicle
April 29th, 1996

Every regular Muni rider knows better than to take a seat without checking it first for food scraps, fluids of unknown orgin or still-wet graffiti.

Scott Hewicker addresses his sculpture to this mode of vision: the assessing glance, in transit to bigger things. So visitors to his show at Gallery 16 are encouraged to arrive by bus. The 22 Fillmore stops a block away, the 19 Polk (northbound), even closer.

Hewicker shares space here with painter Cliff Hengst, whose work is more conspicuous than Hewicker’s but less rewarding to think about. He shares Hewicker’s interest in the fact that the contemporary art world is filled with perils we often cannot recognize even after we notice them.

Hewicker’s "Only Love Can Sustain", his only piece in the first room, is a tight grid of small gray porcelain tiles on the floor, dolloped with bright orange blobs of a modeling material know as Sculpey. It alerts us to look for his work under foot, and some of it is hard to spot on the gallery’s rugged wood floor.
"Only Love Can Sustain" is partly an adolescent critical joke: The supposed "purity" of minimalism makes Hewicker ill. His tile grid invokes canonical works of minimalism, such as the flat metal arrays of Carl Andre.
The blobs of color Hewicker puts down recall the painterly ejaculations of Abstract Expressionism, against which artists such as Andre reacted, and the later "anti-form" backlash against minimalist geometry in key works such as Richard Serra’s lead splash pieces, including the one now installed in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
In the ‘90’s, amid an era of ecological disaster and AIDS, spills and accretions have more ominous references. Today we never know whether the signs of calamity will appear in the atmosphere, oozing in the street or on our own skin.

Hewicker’s materials barely function representationally, but their vagueness itself mirrors our reluctance to focus on whatever we fear might hold portents.