Mediums, Unbounded:

Lilian Garcia-Roig and Guerra de la Paz 

            On the surface, two features connect the work of Lilian Garcia-Roig and Guerra de la Paz: content and color.  The painter employs nature as her primary subject and renders it through a vivid, though at times unexpected, palette.  The sculptors shape a landscape from motley garments, combining diverse tonalities for prismatic effect.  The impulse to exhibit them together is not merely superficial.  Through their practice, these artists challenge the boundaries of their mediums in ways that link their respective projects.  Garcia-Roig and Guerra de la Paz immerse their viewers within enveloping spaces that disconnect them from the real world while simultaneously forcing them to reassess the nature of reality itself.

            Over the past few years, Lilian Garcia-Roig has taken the landscape as a point of departure for her painterly explorations.  She paints out-of-doors and strives to translate the natural world as she sees it at a precise moment in time.  Because she works over several hours, however, she captures the changing light within a single canvas.  Unlike the Impressionist painter Claude Monet, who made separate paintings for different times of day, Garcia-Roig brings these moments together, resulting in what she refers to as a cumulative landscape.  Her paintings argue that perception itself is cumulative and that how she paints most closely approximates how we actually see.  The paintings have thick, palpable surfaces achieved through finger painting, squeezing tubes of pigment directly on the canvas, and applying paint with a palette knife.  They tend to describe dense and chaotic spaces and are rendered in a maximalist style, overwhelming the spectator with their visual material.  The eye is not permitted to rest in any particular location because every inch is covered with varying colors and textures.  Viewing Garcia-Roig’s paintings is a confusing and disorienting experience, like looking at something before the brain has sorted out the information so as to render it intelligible.  Her paintings disconnect visual perception from the necessary process of data analysis.

            In their arrangement into an installation that wraps around the walls of a gallery, Garcia-Roig’s paintings compound their effect of overpowering sight.  Not only do they exhaust the eyes, they also make the viewers more aware of their own position in space, calling attention to how vision is an embodied process – in other words, the way we perceive the world depends on our upright bodies.  As the gaze shifts around the room to take in her painted scenes, the verticality of the body is the clearest point of reference within the chaos; it anchors our vision, which would otherwise become lost in the muddle.  Garcia-Roig’s paintings thus play with both virtual and real space.  They reference scenes from nature that are so intense that they force the spectators to regain awareness of their surroundings; they must remind themselves that they are standing in a gallery, not lost in the woods.

            Garcia-Roig also invokes real space through the dense, painterly layers of her canvases.  The surfaces appear to be shaped and modeled as though she were working in a three-dimensional medium.  The paintings hold together when viewed from afar, but seeing them up close is an altogether different experience, for they come undone.  What looked like leaves and branches turn out to be random blotches of sometimes arbitrary color applied in a seemingly haphazard fashion.  What was a window unto another world a few feet back becomes an abstract relief.  In this way, the spectator’s physical positioning dictates the modality of the work, whether abstract or representational, painted or sculpted.  Garcia-Roig succeeds in bringing to life not just the painted forests she depicts but the entire physical space of and surrounding her canvases.

            Guerra de la Paz’s sculptural installation Spring Sprang Sprung similarly envelops the viewer within an alternate reality.  The artists construct a budding tree out of discarded clothing, tying together all manner of shirts and pants, dresses, sweaters, socks, and skirts to create the trunk, branches, leaves, and flowers.  Through their installation as well as the ambiance created by the lighting and wall colors, they achieve a complete transformation of the gallery space.  The effect is engaging and whimsical, like walking into a children’s story.  The array of colors and textures sustains visual interest, as does the mode of execution, which also produces a sense of wonderment.  How is it that old cast-offs can be transformed into something so appealing?

This and most of the duo’s work shares a pictorial quality that is rare to find in sculpture.  It used to be common in classical times for the surfaces of statues and buildings to be colored over, but in high art since the Renaissance an emphasis on artistic purity insisted on keeping mediums separate and discrete.  This meant that painting was inherently colorful, but sculpture was bound to the hues of its raw material, whether wood, stone, clay, or metal.  Another consequence was to limit the narrative potential of sculpture. Whereas painting could tell stories and create parallel universes, sculpture was static by nature.  Guerra de la Paz refuse to be confined by such conventions; their work is more akin to painting because it employs a limitless palette and evokes multiple narratives.  Even in such a piece as Spring Sprang Sprung with its landscape theme, the narrative is implied through its physical make-up.  Each garment tells a separate story, evoking the life of its previous owner.

In their use of unconventional materials, Guerra de la Paz also engage with the legacy of modernist sculpture, particularly the readymade.  Ever since Marcel Duchamp inverted a urinal and called it a sculpture, the nature of the medium has been redefined.  In the 1960s, the French Nouveaux Réalistes made assemblages out of garbage as a critique against excessive consumerism, and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg “polluted” paintings by integrating real objects into them.  What this deployment of the readymade tended to have in common was that it presupposed a critique against painting, whether for its overemphasis on visuality (its “retinal” aspect, as Duchamp called it) or for its fetishization and ineluctable association with the bourgeois commodity.  Guerra de la Paz’s work also contains a strong critical element, but its object is not painting; on the contrary, they use the readymade object to create painterly compositions in space.  Furthermore, they engage both beauty and sentimentality, aspects rejected by their predecessors.  Not only are Guerra de la Paz’s installations visually stunning (like Garcia-Roig’s paintings, they are almost overwhelming in their excess of optical information), but they also call forth a sense of loss, underscoring the absence of the clothes’ previous owners.

On another level, Guerra de la Paz’s sculptural installations may be read as social commentaries.  In the case of Spring Sprang Sprung, its primary targets are individualism, waste, and consumerism.  In their recycling of articles of clothing – much of which retains its vibrant colors and appears quite wearable – the artists call attention to society’s material excesses.  They also put forth a vision of an alternate world that favors the collective as opposed to the individual.  The knotting together of garments could be read as a metaphor for humanity’s interconnectedness, and the evocation of the primal space of nature further rejects the division and compartmentalization brought about by modernity.  Indeed, Guerra de la Paz’s installations are emphatically untechnological; they depend on collaboration and teamwork to come together, and their mode of execution is transparent.  By working as a pair, Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz have already renounced their own individuality, and their work asks the viewers to contemplate the possibility of less ego and more community.  Their sculptural installation thereby takes viewers on a journey through different realities: the initial feeling of having entered another world when one encounters Spring Sprang Sprung gives way to a reflection on how to improve the one we actually inhabit.

The artistic visions of Lilian Garcia-Roig and Guerra de la Paz have many commonalities.  These artists refuse to be contained by the limits imposed over their respective mediums.  Garcia-Roig rejects conventional wisdom on the art of painting as something that may be viewed instantaneously; rather, she provides so much visual information as to require painting to take on a temporal dimension.  She also makes the full experience of seeing her work contingent on real space.  Guerra de la Paz introduce both narrative and color to the traditionally static and monochrome medium of sculpture, entering into a productive dialogue with painting that also serves to challenge the individualism thought to be inherent in the artistic act.  Immersing their spectators within their constructed landscapes, Garcia-Roig and Guerra de la Paz ask them to reevaluate their own realities, whether from a subjective or a collective perspective

By Tatiana Flores, Curator of Exhibition