| Concerned with the notion that the work of art consists of a coalescence of the viewer’s own perception with the object, artists Marcela Cabutti and Mónica Millán—both showing in New York for the first time—create multileveled works in a variety of media that explore the nature of experience. Marcela Cabutti, who was born in La Plata, the capital city of the Buenos Aires Province in Argentina, and currently lives in Buenos Aires, produces an art of fantasy and magical transformation that can be associated with Surrealism. |  |
Sarah Boydell
Concerned with the notion that the work of art consists of a coalescence of the viewer’s own perception with the object, artists Marcela Cabutti and Mónica Millán—both showing in New York for the first time—create multileveled works in a variety of media that explore the nature of experience. Marcela Cabutti, who was born in La Plata, the capital city of the Buenos Aires Province in Argentina, and currently lives in Buenos Aires, produces an art of fantasy and magical transformation that can be associated with Surrealism. However, her pieces are more specifically connected with the rich Argentinean literary tradition of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Silvina Ocampo, Manuel Puig, and Ernesto Sábato, whose writings Cabutti has passionately absorbed, along with that of the Uruguayan writer Marosa di Giorgio and the Japanese writers Tanizaki and Kawabata. As in the short stories of Borges and Cortázar, shifting points of view and a metaphysical sense of time and place are essential aspects of Cabutti’s work. For the artist, a challenge has been to capture the narrative moment and the varying perspectives of literature in visual form. Making us see with a child’s sense of innocence and magic, her works are multilayered, with naïveté often overlaid with a self-conscious awareness, while sometimes it is the other way around. Indeed, usually there are several levels of recognition and experience in her art.
A flower of epoxy and resin is blue and large, evoking the surprise of a child discovering it in a garden, yet the flower also seems over-mechanized and perhaps too blue, as if to remind us that a garden itself consists of controlled and transformed nature. Cabutti’s landscapes, enclosed within glowing boxes, have an antediluvian look, like mountains and lakes in a formative stage, yet that a landscape could be boxed, and that a small box could represent a larger world, is recognized by the way that Cabutti has “gift-wrapped” these forms. There is a metaphor in the way that these simply made watery landscapes have been set within complex constructions, wired electrically. Even the volcano within a box is less complicated than its outer packaging.
Cabutti has also used photography to invert layers of reality. Epoxy and resin cacti stand against photographs of these sculptures. While the images seem larger in scale than their source, they are no less real than the epoxy creations—made to seem perhaps more diminutive than they would without this juxtaposition. For other works, Cabutti has made silver-colored epoxy leaves and hung them on a real tree, which she then photographs. In her final images, the epoxy leaves are hung onto the photographs including images of them. A group of nine painted blue women add further to Cabutti’s plays on reality. All the women have the same bodies, reflecting submissiveness, yet their differently sprouting-plant heads convey their inner spiritedness; although evoking the garden in a child’s imagination coming to life at night, an adult awareness and sense of irony preside among these succulent creatures. Sophisticated in their process, Cabutti’s works remind us of the bittersweet desire within each of us to freeze our childhoods with the knowing awareness of this impossibility.
Mónica Millán, who was born in San Ignacio, in the Misiones Province of Argentina and currently lives in Buenos Aires, creates lavish and sumptuous “gardens” and “rivers” that flow, surge, and roil. These works evoke the movement of water, subterranean realms, overfilled gardens, picnics by the sea, luxuriant tropical jungles, but the forms in these works are not natural; none are even individually or botanically recognizable, and they are made of constructed materials, foreign to their subject matter. Millán has transformed a natural world into a fantastic version of itself, a child’s idealization of nature, a fairy tale, or a pure expression of nature’s freedom. There is also a sense, though, of beauty taken too far, to such an extreme as to stir up a sinister undercurrent of possible danger and tension. As the artist has built her works three-dimensionally within space, the uncertainties of distance and scale evoke our ambiguous relationship to nature.
Then, standing back and taking a more distant perspective, we are aware of these creations for their craftsmanship. Although Millán’s process involves acting on instinct, the work is clearly labor-intensive and obsessive, consisting of embroidering, braiding, beading, and knot tying, which she uses to produce intricate connections, tiers, and overlays. The works seem to lack seams and edges, making it extremely difficult to follow the twisted skeins and determine what holds these pieces together. Yet we cannot stand back passively and pensively. It is necessary to let go of our sense of space and the need to quantify and identify. Only by becoming involved in these works can we receive what they have to give us; we can only get energy out of them by putting in energy of our own.
Millán’s drawings have a similar effect of calling our attention first to their sheer visual splendor. Natural and floral forms seem to materialize and bloom as if by magical invocation against monochromatic fields of miniaturistic detail. On a closer look, we become aware of the artist’s meticulous draftsmanship, and wonder at a process that involves working in the dark from a single projected beam of light. While invoking the history of Arcadian imagery, from the 18th-century dreamscapes portraying lush bowers through French Impressionist celebrations of suburban outdoor amusements, Millán’s interactive nature-based fairy tales, in needing our engagement, are ultimately metaphors, calls to leave behind our jaded and dispassionate selves.
