| Argentinian native Graciela Cassel’s latest work soars in Miami; her exhibition at the Women’s History Gallery at the Women’s Park gets off the ground with a series of works that dramatize in a powerful way Cassel’s interior dialogue on the intersections of space, place, time, memory, culture and history. |  |
Graciela Cassel – Christine Kennedy
Argentinian native Graciela Cassel’s latest work soars in Miami; her exhibition at the Women’s History Gallery at the Women’s Park gets off the ground with a series of works that dramatize in a powerful way Cassel’s interior dialogue on the intersections of space, place, time, memory, culture and history. This new series of mixed media works, compelling and beautiful objects in acrylic, wood and plexiglass, emphasize the leitmotif of a spiritual journey that is at once historically embedded and intensely intimate and personal. Appropriately, this show will soon travel to her home turf, August 16th-September 9th 2007, at the centro Cultural ;Borges in an exhibition Utopias, Technicas Mixtas Y Cajas.
Deconstructed architectural elements—staircases rent asunder– levitate as graphic expressions of Cassel’s instinctual taste for practicing an archi-undoing that allow her to contest the principles of conventional representational logic, but the real coup emerges from her decision to extend her vision to an installation format; a 4’ by 4’ vessel or ship, provocatively named “Sailing with Picasso,” impresses not merely because of its amplified size, but because we get the sense that this piece obliquely signifies a quasi-nascent scene of an artist emerging into her own out of the deep belly of art history. Cassel flies; her liberation, reflected in her favoring free-standing pieces that engage the surrounding space as an open sky or sea, seeks a horizon beyond the constraints of modernity.
Cassel’s homage to Picasso is an expression of gratitude as well as a recognition of the deep connection between inherited forms of life, culture and art and her own spiritual journey. A myriad of visual transfigurations are recorded as a fractured geometry; Cassel presents de-substantialized and abstracted forms and ideal objects, mutations of organic life, and the morphic and the amorphic as objects of contemplation. Within this framework, the legacy of forms that shape our cultural life continue to speak, but Cassel’s take on this history is invariably inquisitive. The emphasis is on process and transformation. We still get the symbolism—staircases, equine figures, roses– that connects us to her early work, but these visual cues have been deepened now by a reflection on her own artistic practice and place. These new works testify to Cassel’s willingness to take risks both personally and artistically; she has moved beyond the controlled meditation on the metaphysical underpinnings of self-definition that characterized her earlier work, her “boxes” of a bound subjectivity that bounced us – the viewer– back and forth within a represented binarism of interior/exterior space.
The move to installation is a natural step for an artist with a penchant for challenging the definitions of painting; by stretching the surface count to three-dimensions in her early work, Cassel delivered a physical instantiation of a refractory theatrics, a novel metrics of the space and place of the imaginary and a contemplation on the identity of the self. Now, in this new series, all vistas are open and she gives us vast seas populated not only by the symbolism of her early work, but saturated in colorful dyes surfacing like tattoos of psychic memory. The splendor of luminous reds, greens and oranges enchant and draw us inward, and the vivid blues transport us to the rarified air and heights of the open sky and seas.
The sky, the seas, are now open, and we are invited to sail with Cassel on her journey. This new series should move us to rethink Cassel’s work as an oeuvre, and, more precisely, as the dream of a life that overflows itself ceaselessly. Cassel soars effortlessly.
