"The Battle of San Romano," an elaborate figure composition by the fifteenth-century master Paolo Uccello, depicting the war between Sienna and Florence, is a remarkable study in stereometric shapes. In Uccello’s painting, a triptych over thirty feet long, the discarded weapons and pieces of armor scattered over the battlefield on which two armies of mounted soldiers engaged each other create a grid-like design. The artfully scattered swords and shafts present a lesson in perspective that includes the foreshortened figure of one fallen soldier.

Given his long-termed preoccupation with the grid, it makes perfect sense that the contemporary sculptor Steven Dono would be drawn to Uccello’s painting. For more than two decades, Dono (who will have you know that Uccello’s original name was Paolo de Dono!) has worked in a studio in the cavernous crypt of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where he is artist-in-residence, and where his grid-centered sculptures have grown increasingly larger with time.

One of the two room-sized pieces that make up Dono’s solo show, "Bare Ruined Puppets," from January 24 through February 17^th at Phoenix Gallery, 586 Broadway, is entitled "Battle of San Romano." It is composed of massive wooded beams and poles, thirty-six verticals (some with sharp points suggesting spears or rockets) and twelve horizontals, bolted together to form a grid. The various sections are stenciled with odd and even numbers, symbolizing the opposing sides of battle. At regular intervals, thick lengths of hemp rope, singed at their edges, project from the vertical components of the grid, suggesting charred weeds and grasses of the battle field, the "scorched earth" of all-out war.

At the center of this maze-like configuration the viewer confronts the bizarre figure of a sketal puppet. While the lone fallen warrior in Uccello’s painting seems an incidental detail in a grander scheme of heroism, Dono’s dead soldier, garbed not in armor but in the camouflage fatigues of modern warfare (here hanging in tatters from his limp form), is the central element of the sculpture, the piece de resistance of the piece, so to speak. He is quite literally a puppet of war, as all soldiers are – their strings manipulated by those who initiate hostilities from safe, lofty distances – and as such a powerful and deeply affecting metaphor of victimhood.

Indeed, Steven Dono’s sculpture, although inspired by Uccello’s painting is its ideological antithesis. While Uccello’s diptych celebrates a military victory credited to Niccolo da Tolentino, a friend and supporter of the Medici, Dono’s sculpture commemorates the anonymous victims of war, whoever they may be and wherever they have fallen. The small puppet figure at the core of the large structure seems to symbolize the vulnerability of the individual caught up as a cog in the much larger framework of the war machine, in the fact of which human life appears minute, meaningless. Although the sculpture is symmetrical and therefore orderly when viewed as a whole, as one walks around it, viewing its internal components from different angles, it appears increasingly chaotic; everything turns topsy turvy, as if to suggest the disorder and dysfunction at the heart of the well-oiled military machine.

For all its expansiveness and complexity, however, "Battle of San Romano" is not an installation, but a discreet and unified sculptural entity with all the formal authority of a work by Robert Morris or Tony Smith.

It is characteristic of Steven Dono’s originality to present antihero sentiments on a heroic scale, just as he confounds all notions of modernism versus postmodernism by employing minimalist form as a context for humanistic social statement. Monumental form can also be a vehicle for wry commentary on our secular society’s increasingly kinky moral predicament as seen in the second sculpture in the present solo exhibition.

Entitled "Annunciation," this piece refers to the event in Christian theology when the angel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary: "You shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall give him the name Jesus." Although the Book of Luke mentions that the angel "went in" to Mary, only rarely do Renaissance painters show us the interior of Mary’s chamber. Usually they tend to depict an exterior setting – an open loggia or portico – while artists of the Counter Reformation do away with the suggestion of an edifice altogether, often picturing a dove descending on the scene out of a sky filled with dazzling light to suggest the nearness of heaven.

Steven Dono, however, builds a veritable bunker of bolted beams, a labyrinthian maze ten feet tall, ten feet wide, ten feet deep, that the visitor to the gallery enters and walks through. Within this space hang ropes that one brushes against as one progresses to a brick and granit enclosureat the center of the maze. In turn, these ropes activate the figure within the enclosure – presumably Mary’s Chamber. But the object we discover within – a bizarre female puppet, naked but for a vinyl corset, garters, black stockings and spiked-heeled shoes – fits no standard description of a virgin… Not unless, by some Clintonesque moral reasoning, we conclude that her S&M get-up denotes erotic tastes so bizarre that she could, in fact, still be virginal in the physical sense. In any case, she confronts us like some specter out of a wetdream-turned-nightmare, her bare pubis bristling with bushy orange hair, her eyes wide, her tongue lolling between blood-red lips, her moveable breasts jiggling grotesquely as she wiggles on strings.

If this is an Annunciation for the year 2001, then who could the angel be but the viewer who enters the bricked-in bunker that serves as the virgin’s chamber? And this in turn begs the question:: what good tidings could there possibly be to announce at this late date?

These are the kinds of questions that this exhibition poses, they are important questions, and the manner in which Steven Dono raises them suggests that he could be an important artist as well.

• Ed McCormack
• Gallery & Studio
• Jan/Feb 2001