Cover art for the invitation to Tom Scicluna’s “Mast” installation

Tom Scicluna’s most recent installation, titled “Mast,” is an abandoned — and then reclaimed — 1968 sailboat pole, diagonally positioned across Twenty Twenty Projects, on the second floor of an old industrial building in Wynwood. Awkward, slim, ellipsoidal, painted in black and a bit longer than the diagonal across the white cubicle containing it, Scicluna’s presentation looks like an unexpected foreign intrusion.

What’s the idea behind this peculiar found object? “Mast” seems pranky, nonsensical, pretentious, faddish and vacuous; definitely not for the nonconceptually motivated. We call these things ready-mades, i.e., stuff artists find and bring into a gallery for people’s scrutiny. They have a bad reputation.

If you believe art critic Clive Bell’s suggestion that the only thing art needs is to have a “significant form,” or Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce’s idea that art needs to communicate an emotion, then Scicluna’s piece hardly counts as art. But wait.

There may be something else there for you. “Mast” offers a clash of size-versus-fitting that can make you think of clumsiness, incongruence, absurdity, even will-to-power. Consider that Scicluna’s artifact has a distant Miami flavor (the invitation to the event shows just the top of six separate masts against a hazy South Florida sky). If you are familiar with this artist’s work, you know this installation plays along with some of his concerns: equilibrium, sparseness and a behind-the-scenes heroic manual labor (bringing the abandoned mast into the gallery required some planning and effort).

On the other hand, at a time when any prank, joke or fad seems to pass as legit, “Mast” would not be what it is were it not for Scicluna’s previous history, motives and research. What I’m saying is that not just anything can count as an installation (in and of itself) unless we have a historic background against which to check the work’s provenance. Is “Mast” good or not good? It’s neither, but that’s not the point. The installation is an event that actually adds up in Scicluna’s artistic biography, which is relevant. Does that sound better to you?

Not far away, Ingalls & Associates presented New Work, an exhibition of works on paper by Raul Perdomo. At first sight Perdomo’s abstract mixed media seems to open up a diverse source of referents. Are these brain-like synapses, coral atolls, clusters of stars amid nuclei blasts or atomic matter bound together by some plasmatic synergy? Perdomo combines marks, blotches, drawings and flimsy doodles, some with a chaotic rhythm, some with a Zen-like parsimony, as if before the zilch of infinitesimal coagulation. It feels momentous and banal: the firing of a dendrite, the ingestion of a protein, the bonding of a crystal.

As soon as Perdomo purportedly disclosed his fascination with quantum mechanics, I grasped a different note regarding his work. If the artist is representing the realm of micro particles (with the aid of our present scientific devices), then what he’s doing is a kind of “intuitive realism.” C’mon, if quarks and gluons resemble anything meaningful, it’s because of our instrumental curiosity to render the universe noticeable.

Why does it matter? Well, intention is a serious business. Pollock’s drippings may resemble a remnant of a supernova or the magnification of the innards of fungi, but it’s none of that. On the other hand, I can paint from the picture of a cross section of a Christmas rose and end up with a Rothko-like image. All this to say that I need to see more of Perdomo’s works to really say what I feel about them. For now, I can surmise that Perdomo has talent and craft and that he’s obsessed with quantum mechanics.

Tom Scicluna’s “Mast,” through Aug. 19, Twenty Twenty Projects, 2020 NW Miami Court, second floor, Miami, 786-217-7683; Raul Perdomo’s New Work, through Aug. 11, Ingalls and Associates, 125 NW 23rd St., Miami, 305-573-6263, www.ingallsassociates.com.

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