Cristina Iglesias
at Gallery 312, through December 17
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
It is this paradox, created by a fusion of opposites–organic lyricism and man-made materials, invitation and rebuff–that’s the crux of Iglesias’s art. A Basque who lives near Madrid, she’s acquired an international reputation at 41; the present exhibit is an intelligently edited version of a show organized by and first presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. In a talk on the day of the opening, Iglesias commented on her use of nature for inspiration. Attracted to wildernesses she’s never seen–“There is no real nature left in Spain,” she said, and “I was never in a bamboo forest”–she recognizes their fundamental incompatibility with culture. Her gentle, decorative aluminum slabs–suggestive of a curtain, tapestry, or Japanese screen–are also cold and forbidding, at once seductive and vaguely unpleasant. Iglesias acknowledges a fundamental contradiction within our culture: that symbolic systems such as language and visual illusion that represent reality ultimately distance us not only from nature but from the entire sensual world. By representing nature in the least likely of substances–using metal rather than plaster or carved wood, for example–Iglesias movingly articulates this contradiction. The depth effects of her cast aluminum re-create the aura of a forest–an aura that suddenly vanishes when we once again attend to her materials.
Iglesias often heightens this contradiction through her placement of the sculptures in space: her metal reliefs “soften” the corners but are also “harder” than the gallery’s walls. She’s suspended Untitled [Hanging Tilted Ceiling]–a series of rectangular blocks cast of resin and colored with stone powder–in rows from the gallery ceiling. The sight of them is at first a little intimidating–I thought of Richard Serra’s massive metal panels, one of which actually fell on and killed a workman during its installation a few years ago. There’s no real reason to worry here, but Iglesias’s veiled, subtextual threat again illuminates her paradoxical fusion of nature and culture. These slabs–less detailed than aluminum casts, they still suggest lichen and mushroom gills–evoke the magical world of a forest floor, but suspended above our heads, a placement as paradoxical as the embodiment of eucalyptus leaves in aluminum or mushrooms in stone. Cast in unlikely materials and displaced from the natural environment, these blocks seem to be our best chance of knowing nature. Yet we can no longer even walk on the natural world: instead it’s present to us as a looming dream, a bizarrely ominous memory.
When he went to Alaska looking for “subject matter that would be as powerful as a tree”–previously he’d done a life-size drawing of a tree on “about 6,000 sheets of paper” assembled on the floor–Bouche found himself mystified by the “incredible power” of this site. After a few days, he says, he saw that the flat field with distant hills and mountains allowed him to see the curvature of the earth. He found this realization “absolutely chilling” in its revelation of the earth’s circularity and monumental size. (This is perhaps why another part of his installation–17 photographs taken from the center of the paper grid to create a panoramic view of the site–are mounted in a single gently curving line.)
