BY JAMES YOOD

There's something rather giddy about Stephen Powell's recent sculptures. His fantastically shaped and proportioned vases are nearly '70s retro in their rhythms and insouciance, suggesting some groovy echoes of a psychedelic light show for a Fillmore West (or East) concert. Powell's works are fast and bulbous, and so beautiful and relentlessly charming as to disarm and seduce their viewers.

His funky titles — like Turbulent Gasp Jones, Teasing Buns Johnson, Undulating Groan Jones, Austere Dripping Smith — are funny and relaxing, easy and amiable, and their keep-on truckin' atmosphere is curiously soothing and mesmerizing. And the ripe and curvaceous shapes of Powell's vessels, their sensual swelling and pinching, is of a warm eroticism that is always heady and pungent. The ample lobes of his recent vases visually hint at buttocks, breasts, testicles or just about any pendulous and heavy erogenous zone you can imagine, all then attenuating toward an impossibly narrow and elegant elongated neck. That wonderful juxtaposition, the slenderness and delicacy of the rising neck next to the groaning scrotal weight of the body, the latter bound by gravity while the former seeks the sky, is a remarkable visual conjoining of seemingly irreconcilable elements. The two forms belong together, and in Powell's cosmos, while hinting at the absurdity of their functionality as vase motifs, they complete one another.

But it is Powell's color — he titled his exhibition "Color Matters" — that truly sets the mind spinning toward tie-dye lusciousness. Created in his Kentucky studio through a sequence of rolling and melting various predetermined patterns of thousands of colored murrini then applying them to the partially blown vessel, Powell will overlap and stretch the murrini, having them, like watercolor, intermingle with one another to create a taffy-pull of color that is sumptuous and swirling. Powell retains the sense that these are rows of colors seemingly stacked like mosaics one upon another then pulled and braided into elastic cornrows of great optical beauty. The cellular-like profile of each melted bead is encouraged to mutate in many directions, tugged by Powell into hints of scales or organisms. He makes color amazingly fluid and malleable and then massages it into shape. And his palette-this exhibition was a honeyed chromatic symphony of burgundy and cranberry, hot oranges and cool purples, biting greens and lavenders. This too was not without a kind of late-hippie, altered states intensity, like one of those Hollywood efforts to suggest an LSD experience.

Powell's color is popping and relentless and not without echoes of some Op Art strategies. His manipulation of shade and tone, the thousands of decisions about saturation and density that he makes are wonderful to witness. Each bead is a separate explosion, part of a larger sequencing, but also coaxed towards its maximum effect. In Powell's hands, the globular propensities of color beads are perfectly commingled with the swelling nature of the glass upon which they are applied, creating a symbiotic congealing that is irreverent, sensual and completely seductive.