A Beautiful Deep Dive Into Our Worldwide Arts + Culture
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A Beautiful Deep Dive Into Our Worldwide Arts + Culture |
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EARTHWORKS AND NEW WORLDS |
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by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp
In addition, it is the catalogue for last summer’s show in Brasília. The two-part exhibition Matéria Prima at the Museu Nacional da República was held in and around the domed structure designed by Oscar Niemeyer.
The artist’s carefully considered thinking about the evolution of Minimalism was combined there with her technical prowess honing and refining the use of late modern industrial materials like carbon fiber. Her work seemed meant for a Niemeyer building with curving, swelling forms and circular reflecting pools. Her 25-foot-tall obelisk erected on the plaza was reiterated inside the museum with seven similarly shaped sculptures that she calls “Parabolic Monoliths.” Orion, Thorium, Polaris, Bismuth, Petrichor, Mercury, Plutonium, as they are titled, are eight feet tall each and rendered in hues corresponding to their mineral-derived titles. They are interconnected by beams of projected light. Three rounded floor sculptures, her “Plasmatic Rhomboids,” also are named after minerals: Thallium, Gallium, Radium. Their horizontality responded to the dome of the Niemeyer building. Another monolith placed in front of the museum related to the axis roads connecting the buildings designed by Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa to create a Brazilian capital city in the heart of the jungle with an optimistic late ‘50s view towards the future. Streamlined shapes and post-war materials used in the buildings are similar to those used by Colón so her art seems as one with the original designs. It looks like Brasília was a kind of destiny for her. She was prepared for this sort of logistical and conceptual challenge after completing The Future is Now, an exceptionally ambitious 25-foot-tall parabolic monolith in the ancient city of AIUla, Saudi Arabia in 2020. The need for monumentality in the vast desert was imperative and her choice of a silvery tone from iridium contrasted with the sandstone canyon. “Each sculptural intervention embodies a particular color-shifting pigment I develop to engage the geological, geographical location or other conditions of the site,” she told Kristin Korolowicz in one of the book’s essays, “Curving the Rational: Tropical Space is the Place.”
In Egypt, where her sculpture was placed in front of the most recognizable and overwhelming of structures, the pyramids of Giza, she responded with a ground-hugging lozenge-shaped dome in a gold-colored gradient, Eternity Now, 2021. Her show in Brazil, however, was especially meaningful as it was the first to be held in Latin America. Her own Puerto Rican heritage has become increasingly important to her as an artist. To see her work in this iconic building, completed in 2006 from an earlier design, when Niemeyer turned 99, was emotionally fulfilling. Colón has increasingly felt connected to Latin American modernism, to the tropical colors, sensual surfaces and organic forms. Argentinian Julio Le Parc, Venezuelans Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesús Rafael Soto in particular used plastics in the ‘60s with jewel tones that led them to be labeled Op Art. What they represented for her was an alternative to the reductive aesthetic of Minimalism, one of her earliest influences. Colón uses the term “plasmatic” to describe “the fourth state of matter created under superheated, intense pressure.” She believes the term can be applied to her own experience, and that of Latinx people generally.
Matéria Prima was explored further in her concurrent show in São Paulo at Instituto Artium, a 100-year manor house designed in the Louis XVI style. What she calls ellipsoidal pieces in glowing rich greens, golds and pinks are hung on walls with original gilded moldings and illuminated by crystal chandeliers. Her monoliths were placed both inside and outside the house in the gardens. Curator Simon Watson conceptualized the show to be reminiscent of the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey where a fantasy of the future collides with the aesthetics of the past. However, this setting accentuated Colón’s extraordinary control of color, apparent as well in her show at Raquel Arnaud Gallery in São Paulo.
Colón’s art came to my attention about 15 years ago as a welcome expansion of ideas about West Coast Minimalism. (I also wrote the essay for her 2015 monograph, Gisela Colón: Pods, which concentrated on that work.) Having befriended DeWain Valentine (1936-2022), one of the first artists to work in poured resin to make grand yet minimalist sculpture, she learned first-hand the origins of the 1960s Light and Space movement that included Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, Peter Alexander, Helen Pashgian, Mary Corse and others. Their materials derived from the post-war aerospace industry in Southern California, a time of optimism similar to that of Brasília. Moving beyond the materials of those artists, she invented her own methods for making bio-morphic structures that captured refined yet intense chroma. The blow mold technique meant they appeared to glow as though illuminated from an artificial source. In the new Skira book, she explained to Susanna V. Temkin, “The technological process I developed sculpts color without any paint. Light itself is the main instrument of perception. The sculptures are composed of an internal structure of multiple layers of optical acrylics and other materials that then act as a prism. The light penetrates through the layers and reflects and refracts into your eyes with an internal glow.” Though using materials that required an increasingly rarified acumen, she originated each piece using the oldest of art skills: drawing. Having immersed herself in the writings of Donald Judd and his logic for making Specific Objects, she referred to her more organic process as making “Non-Specific Objects.”
Moving away from the translucence and perceptual questions of her predecessors, she looked to her own past in making solid if reflective monoliths that are indisputably phallic while also emulating that shapes of fuselages. Or bullets. She has since come to think about them as having roots in the violence and political turmoil of Latin American history, which also happens to be her own, born in Vancouver as the daughter of a Puerto Rican chemist and German art historian. She was raised on the island, graduating with a degree in economics and political science from the University of Puerto Rico, before studying and then practicing law in Los Angeles. Though her sculptures have been presented globally, most recently at the Havana Biennial in Cuba and a sculpture installation in Bodrum, Turkey, the presentation in Brazil was a kind of exultant manifestation, one that could only come together after decades of life and art experiences.
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