Epoxy Playmates

Hugh Hefner has one by his bedside, and Capitol Records could think of nothing more delightful to give to the Beatles for a present. Small wonder, considering what the girls are like. Slightly more astonishing is that the slender, sexy, epoxy-resin swingers molded by Illinois Sculptor Frank Gallo, 34, also spice up museums from Caracas, Venezuela, to Baltimore, Milwaukee, and even Victoria, Australia.

What raises Gallo's girls above the level of genteel pornography is clearly visible at the moment in Manhattan's Graham Gallery. There sit, stand or recline ten of them, all in various voluptuous poses and assorted stages of undress. One, clad in a tank suit with a number "3" on its belly, perches on a revolving turnstile. Another, in what may or may not be a bikini top, cuddles on a brown floor rug. Still another, falling out of her low-necked dress, lounges against a lavishly embroidered sofa. The skin of each has the alabaster transparency of beeswax or some expensive face cream made with royal jelly. But their hair, their eyes, their mouths, their stiletto-heeled shoes and the upholstery against which they nestle are all an ugly, and yet powerfully nostalgic, Victorian shade of brown. The mordancy of this color and the wistfulness of the girls' expressions save them from what would otherwise be a cloying coyness. Each girl becomes both an icon of seduction and, at the same time, a sly satire of all she suggests.

Gallo, a native of Toledo, Ohio, who now heads the graduate sculpture school at the University of Illinois in Urbana, achieves his effects by first sculpting his figures in clay. Then he casts them in translucent plastic. He then burns and etches in darker epoxy in the areas he wishes to color brown, leaves the rest skin colored.

Gallo sometimes sculpts men--on display at the Graham Gallery there are two, fully dressed and both looking singularly exhausted, possibly from the presence of so much female flesh. He has even been known to sculpt a cat (Rex Harrison has that). But he really considers himself "a female worshiper," and looks forward to playing Pygmalion to the first automated Galatea.

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