Cristina Iglesias & the Sleight of Hand

Cristina Iglesias, Double Pavillion Suspended in a Room, 2005, braided wire, steel cables - 50 screens, each 72.80 x 47.25 in.

Cristina Iglesias’s new installations at the Marian Goodman gallery are best experienced through an investigation of what they aren’t, achieving a rare level of the semiotic quality in sculpture that simultaneously seduces and excludes, an articulation akin to the most alluring yet cryptic prose in literature.

Iglesias uses industrial, unforgiving materials, casts an alchemical spell to transform wire into sumptuous braids which resemble reeds or rattan in Double Pavilion Suspended in a Room. Their identity is further compounded by welding marks or a near-decorative pattern of elaborate patina which unifies the braids into sections of open basket-woven panels, suspended by steel cables in a shape that evokes ancient temples, prayer spaces, or even the pagoda-shaped mall kiosk.

The shadows mark mysteries on the walls and floor, and in peering between the layers of the panels, a complex archetypal geometry forms itself into obscured letters, teasing yet another implication in the space. A temptation arises to be inside the room created, which looking outward reveals a sanctuary, a hidden place imbued with the serene sense of protection. In this way, Iglesias engages the whole body in a participatory, complicit sense, both creating and fulfilling visceral longing in an intellectual, distantly spiritual connection.

The disconnects begin when the viewer detaches from his corporeal integration – sudden breaks of logic and sensation quiet the spells and create an overpowering disengagement as the reality of what the work is not begins to condense. Following the steel cables upward, there is a jarring realization that this work is not magically or ephemerally suspended; it is brutally honest in that it is simply screwed into the gallery ceiling. What appeared as a unified construction reveals itself as fifty modular screens which do not even touch each other. Looking again at those magical and enchanting shadows, one sees what they are cast upon: the vulgar white walls and standard grey floor. In such hard disorientation, one could even become distracted by the construction just outside the window, scaffolding echoing the intriguing shapes, it too shrouded in a mesh of craftily deceptive material.

Here in these breaks, the concavity flexes back out into convexity – the optical illusions of completeness reassemble – and the true capability and adaptive nature of Iglesias’s transformation reappears in a startling fullness, made more intense by the separations and jolts of actuality. She has made both of these worlds real in the same place.

A similar effect occurs in the South room installation Pasillio Vegetal III, where fiberglass, polyester resin, and patinated bronze powder are transfigured into teeming vine-like surfaces, lush and writhing with vitality. Thirty-eight panels become a massive serpentine corridor, reminiscent of a very organic Richard Serra. As the viewer is captivated by the depth in the range of muted greens and browns, he is drawn in to the surface, pulled through the doorway into what seems to be an inviting, if slightly intimidating, secretive place.

Suddenly it stops – the walls curl tightly into a claustrophobic cul-de-sac, and what was once the threshold of possibility tightens into captivation and domination. The scale of experience shifts dramatically to suffocation, as if a wrong turn led down a well. The white rabbit cannot be far off.

Emerging back out, the transformative power of this space is disorienting, especially when considered in view of the long white hall that led into it. How can a space change so quickly from an intriguing gracious hostess to a hulking, leering trap? Herein again lies the power Iglesias has to involve the whole body and through it, our most open and genuine relation to the work. With subtle intensity and fascinating twists, a surreality is both fabricated and deconstructed before us, addressing and confounding our bodies with illusion and detailed surface, while distorting, disrupting, and startling our grasp on the moment with a well-played sleight of hand.

Cristina Iglesias activates new possibilities in aesthetic experience, through masterful illusory use of materials and space and clever exchanges with the body. Dynamic, complex, and wholly beautiful even when it disintegrates (or perhaps because it disintegrates), her work engages the entirety of the viewer, providing an unforgettable encounter with the unreliability of perception and a lasting wariness for searching only at face value.

LINKS:

- Marian Goodman Gallery, New York NY
- Slideshow, Double Pavilion, The New York Times

Strength of Conviction at "Remote Viewing"

What impressed me most in the “Remote Viewing” show at the Whitney was not the scale of Matthew Ritchie’s installation, nor the level of detail in DiBenedetto’s octopus-like sprawling paintings; rather, in this show of eight contemporary artists was intentionality. The precision and specificity with which ideas were expressed altered perceptions and introduced interior mindscapes in ways so seductive, so singular in their focus, that the exhibition could adequately live up to its “Invented Worlds” subtitle.

In abstract painting and drawing, it is often difficult to evoke an exact desired response – viewers are faced with cryptic titles, statements which hint at powerful complex themes, yet seem mismatched with wholly unrelated imagery or scattered visual ejaculations. In this case, for a refreshing change of pace, the ideas coalesce with the artists’ intents, and the images are not out of left-field but rather honed, articulate choices, which despite some tendencies toward “visual exhaustion” as Ritchie laments, remain potent, vital, palatable, and real.

Terry Winters presented three large abstract oil paintings accompanied by a set of drawings. Using remarkably simple color and downright capricious painting in places, an essence came through: lines teemed into blastospheres and multiplying cells, organic and molecular shapes addressed the physics of creation and existence.

Perhaps the most deliberate and effective pieces were those of Alexander Ross, whose large, seemingly photorealistic untitled oil paintings of plasticine-molded biomorphic shapes stood apart as the mysterious alien beauty in the sci-fi flick – the intimidating and slightly haunting prescience of dangerous, sexy things to come in what I can only hope to be the future of exquisite abstraction. With calculated color gradations and paint thickly applied in controlled strata, strange green forms come to life in teeming, vibrant ways. Set adrift on flat sky-blue backgrounds, the forms seem all the more threatening and detached from the comfortable and ordinary, yet with a level of crisp rendering, they recall intimate portraits of favorite toys; they are engaging, intriguing, and above all intentional. Ross’s more abstract pieces, without an external environment and incorporating elements of translucency, reveal that the efficacy of this work is no accident. His steady color palette and fixated subject matter underscore a true mastery and fluency in his personal painting language, a self-assured thrust which hits its mark every time.

Line played an important role in many of the other works in this exhibit, from the comic- and illumination-referencing intricacies of Ati Maier, the exhausting map-like descriptions by Julie Mehretu, to the frenzied expressionistic use in Franz Ackermann and Steve DiBenedetto’s psycho-surrealist paintings. Matthew Ritchie’s intense meanderings particularly hit upon an effective conveyance, deploying Sharpie lines over smooth layers of dissociated imagery, both enhancing one’s awareness of the immediate gesture and gently pushing the subtler areas to recede into alternate dimensions of visual space and reality. The specific shapes and curves of his central installation which ran onto the walls and ceiling brought to life an elaborate sequence of scribbled journeys, wrought with such a tireless obsession that one cannot doubt the artist’s serious concern for every linear nuance. I was desperately curious to examine the shadows cast upon the floor, and while at first disappointed that they could not be seen against the black-brown polished tiles, I found the much subtler effect of dissipating dark on dark to be equally if not more alluring, completing and anchoring the imaginative space in the murky recesses of the unknown.

The only work which seemed out of place in such a lush and fertile landscape of originality was that of Carroll Dunham, who in this context seemed stale. Lacking the elaborate use of line and elegant challenges of color and form as in the other pieces, Dunham’s detached, flat scenes employed one or two colors with mostly black and white, and seemed over-simplified, disengaged, and oddly uninviting.

As an expression of the current conscious- (or unconscious-)ness of painting and drawing, this show is hypnotic, dynamic, and exciting. The works presented give access to an inner world of tumultuous and evocative imagery, made real by devoted representation of unreal things and controlled, forceful technical superiority. Presenting work with the integrity to stand behind itself to completely actualize contexts and imaginary worlds, the Whitney has convincingly portrayed a very much alive-and-well world of painters doing what they do best, with visually stunning and intellectually satisfying pieces as testaments to the health and spirit of experimental tenacity and skillful execution.