| Argentinian native Graciela Cassel’s latest work dramatizes interior dialogues on the intersections of space, place, time, memory, culture, and history. This new mixed media series consists of objects in acrylic, wood, and plexiglass that emphasize the leitmotif of a spiritual journey at once embedded in history and intensely intimate and personal. Appropriately, the series recently traveled to her home country, and was on view at the Centro Cultural Borges in the exhibition “Utopias, Technicas Mixtas Y Cajas.” |
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Christine Kennedy on Graciela Cassel
Argentinian native Graciela Cassel’s latest work dramatizes interior dialogues on the intersections of space, place, time, memory, culture, and history. This new mixed media series consists of objects in acrylic, wood, and plexiglass that emphasize the leitmotif of a spiritual journey at once embedded in history and intensely intimate and personal. Appropriately, the series recently traveled to her home country, and was on view at the Centro Cultural Borges in the exhibition “Utopias, Technicas Mixtas Y Cajas.”
Deconstructed architectural elements levitate, as graphic expressions of Cassel’s contesting the principles of conventional, representational logic. A four-foot by four-foot vessel provocatively signifies journeys and flight; her free-standing pieces engage the surrounding space as an open sky or sea, and seek a horizon beyond the visible.
In part an homage to Picasso, this work is an expression of gratitude as well as the recognition of deep connections between inherited forms of life, culture, art, and the artists’ own spiritual journey. Cassel records visual transfigurations as fractured geometry and presents abstract forms, ideal objects, mutations of organic life, and morphic and amorphic forms. 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; symbols such as staircases, equine figures, and roses, connecting points to a previous body of work, occur throughout. These new works deepen her reflections on her own place and artistic practice. She has moved beyond the controlled meditation on the metaphysical underpinnings of self-definition that characterized her earlier work: “boxes” of bound subjectivity that bounced viewers back and forth within a represented binary of interior and 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 refractory theatrics, a novel metrics of space, the place of the imaginary, and a contemplation on the identity of the self. In her new series, all vistas are open and Cassel 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.
Luminous reds, greens, and oranges draw one inward. Vivid blues transport one to the rarified air and heights of the open sky and seas. Cassel invites us to sail with her.
