Charles Ray Is Pushing Sculpture to Its Limit

With four surveys, the challenging Los Angeles artist has redefined his art form in a flat-screen world.

I was looking up at the head, but I was mistaken. Charles Ray was instructing me to look at the foot.

It was a freezing morning, and Ray and his crew had just finished installing a new work by this Los Angeles sculptor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was, like every Ray installation, a logistical feat — his strangely sized nudes or eerie wrecked cars can weigh four tons or more — but Omicron breakouts had wrought havoc on the movement of sculptures and technicians, and this one almost didn’t make it to New York. “Archangel,” 13.5 feet tall and seven years in the making, depicts a seminude young man in flip-flops and rolled-up jeans, carved from cypress by woodworkers in Japan. The pandemic prevented Ray from traveling to Osaka to approve the final work, and shipping troubles almost kept it from reaching New York — “Archangel” had to be flown to LAX and driven cross-country.

At last it was here. The surfer dude of “Archangel” is no messenger of God, and yet his body appears almost to be undergoing an apotheosis. His facial features are soft; his hair is done up in a topknot. The waistband of his trousers curves out slightly from the torso. Lower down the sculpture, though, are breathtaking vestiges of humanity. On his Achilles tendons, for instance, which the Japanese craftsmen scored a dozen times each. There are gentle gashes on the arches of his feet, and his half-visible foot soles. A single timber runs from his head through his big toe to the floor, and reveals that the figure and the block he stands on are one and the same.