Ruben Ochoa

San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art

Through June 20

One of California’s “most eloquent sculptors,” Ruben Ochoa grew up in a family of construction workers, said Holly Myers in the Los Angeles Times. His preferred artistic media still include concrete, chain-link fencing, shipping pallets, and the reinforced-steel beams known as rebar. Ochoa clearly draws inspiration from such “grittily vernacular” elements, but his sculptures’ beauty comes from the way he transforms the raw materials, instilling “elements of playfulness, elegance, and grace.” The enormous piece watching, waiting, commiserating (2010), on display in the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art’s new Ochoa show, consists of 11 shipping pallets, suspended “on spindly, wavering rebar legs, like a throng of enormous swaying spiders.” There’s nothing heavy about it—physically or metaphorically.

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Though Ochoa is often playful, he “isn’t about to be limited to one style of working with his materials,” said Robert Pincus in The San Diego Union-Tribune. He’s equally capable of creating stark, monumental structures full of drama and dignity. For several works here, he has piled numerous wooden pallets atop one another to create stacks “the size of small buildings.” The single-minded repetitiveness of his method can be reminiscent of the minimalism of Donald Judd, “with none of the polish and pristine qualities.” Ultimately, however, what makes these works impressive isn’t their simplicity but their sheer height and weight. “They set up a tension between our body and the structure that hovers high above us”—they’re big enough to seem dangerous. At 35, Ochoa is still near the start of his career, but this son of Mexican immigrants has already forged an aesthetic that’s “particularly American”—muscular, democratic, and “implicitly blue collar.”