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Living in America for the past eleven years, Oates has indulged in an expatriate fantasy of English life. He has fashioned his vision into brightly coloured, chubby sculptural vignettes of Englishness which sit on five hillocks on the gallery floor. These are cheery in a gloppy way, all curves and cartoonish features. Upon one, Untitled (bird) (all works 1998), an oversized blue bird contemplates a squiggly pink worm that emerges from the green sward. On another mound, Untitled (knight), a knight on horseback struggles valiantly through a ploughed field, almost submerged in mud, whilst his castle teeters on the brink of the horizon. The smooth green surfaces of the other hills bear imprints of enormous bird feet: but there are no traces of industrial intervention, or signs of motorway intrusion. Indeed, all the nasty effects of Modernity on the landscape are missing. There are no combine harvesters, electricity pylons, cars or processing factories, but instead, a naive vision of green countryside with birds and oak trees. ...

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Early in 1994 Daniel Oates garnered attention with his beautifully carved comic portraits of "Happy Workers": policemen, cleaning ladies, a postman with an envelope in hand, all about 2 feet tall and cheerfully engaged in their occupations. His farcical, Pop-Surrealist vision, not so distant from Jeff Koons's deadpan kitsch, was all the more engaging for his considerable skill. The perfectly crafted detailing of his figures, uniforms and all, made Oates's creations seem vividly human and alive.

After a two-year hiatus, Oates offered in this recent show four extremely idiosyncratic sculptures plus a pair of wall-hung bat wings decorated with Biblical imagery and two drawings (one in colored pencil and the other in graphite) that were studies for the wings. The viewer had the feeling that the exhibition, while continuing Oates's interest in magically real figurative carvings, was at the same time shifting toward the presentation ! of a fairy-tale world whose odd lyricism appears to owe much of its charm to cartoons and other popular-culture ephemera.

Oates's humor continues unabated in his sculptures. "Under the Influence of Hair (Head)", 1997, made of linden wood, is an oversized head which, with the exception of its large, elaborately carved ears, is completely covered by gently curling carved tresses. The locks' wavelike patterns conceal the facial features; one can see the suggestion of a nose protruding slightly in the middle of the face, where it should be. The viewer thinks of some ogre too dumb to comb his hair from his eyes, or of a Saturday-morning-cartoon monster who has yet to reveal his frighteningly ugly countenance.

The odd ambience surrounding this inexplicable head is reprised in Returning Demons (acrylic on linden wood, 1998) a wall piece in which three cows' heads corkscrew out toward the viewer from a single outsize ear framed by carved brown hair. The sweet-faced, large-eyed cows seem absurdly dumb and benign; nonetheless, the image possesses a slightly sinister aura. The other two sculptures, both floor pieces made of styrene and epoxy resin with oil paint, take the form of a conch-like ear and a tortoise. ...