• Courtesy
• "Time Traveler (bandscape)"

Clark Derbes is not a mathematician, but geometry might be his muse. The Louisiana-born artist began to make a literal mark on Burlington some 20 years ago when his bold, blocky designs appeared on electrical boxes around town. (It was a commission, not tagging.) Since then, his distinctive public art has appeared on buildings, sidewalks and, for a few years, moribund tractor trailers in a Pine Street parking lot.

Derbes also paints on more portable surfaces: brain-puzzling patterns in parallel or serpentine lines, as well as pointillist landscapes with transcendental colors. During a few years living in rural Charlotte, he created an art "farmstand," offering paintings à la produce on the side of the road.

But the artist, who now resides in Burlington's South End, may be best known for his wood sculptures: three-dimensional trapezoids, parallelograms and other multisided figurations. Using mostly reclaimed and drift wood, Derbes carves these shapes with a chain saw, then polychromes their surfaces in a variety of stripes, checkerboards and patterns that rival the graphic shenanigans of M.C. Escher.

• Courtesy Of Dan J. Cardon
• Clark Derbes with column sculptures

Nine of these colorful tabletop sculptures are on view in Derbes' new exhibit, titled "Self-Commissioned," at RLPhoto Studio on Sears Lane. But newer works occupy the airy gallery space, as well. Derbes calls them columns. While most of his smaller objects have a chunky solidity, the columnar pieces are vertical stalks set in a minimal square wood base.

Derbes arranged eight of his columns in a straight line, bisecting the gallery like sentinels on duty. But they are set far enough apart that viewers can slalom between them for closer examination. Each column is a different height, diameter and color — though one eight-foot piece is unpainted. It was carved from a cedar trunk aged outdoors for three years, according to Derbes, and the wood's crenulated texture shows its seniority.

It's tempting to anthropomorphize these sculptures; each somehow conveys a unique personality. While some are ramrod straight, one is a bit wavy (bad posture); another one arcs slightly (overeager?). The thickest one exudes gravitas.

• Courtesy
• "Time Traveler (portrait in blue)"

What the columns have in common are diamonds. That is, Derbes has cut the wood all around — with a hatchet and a drawknife — so that each side appears essentially to be a stack of rough diamond shapes. By painting them and then sanding their edges, he gave the diamonds outlines. One thick, 70-inch-tall sculpture is painted in three shades of blue, like a harlequin totem. Another, 82 inches high, is painted in black, white and gray, creating positive and negative elements that toy with a viewer's perspective.

If the artwork's materiality is drawn from nature — that is, trees — Derbes owes his design sensibility to math. He could have simply burnished and painted tubular remnants of fallen wood and called it a day; instead, he laboriously transformed them from top to bottom into a multiplicity of surfaces.

• Courtesy
• "Time Traveler (sunset)"

Each of these facets is rife with fascinating textures — marks delivered in blows. Derbes' hand is evident, and that hand was holding an ax.

His columns of diamonds illustrate astounding skill with a relatively crude tool — one normally used for the brutish chopping of firewood. It is to the artist's credit, too, that he has not hacked one of his own limbs.

The newest works in "Self-Commissioned" illustrate Derbes' boundless, playful experimentation with form and scale, as well as his personal communion with the natural world.