Yet We Continue to Build There, The Structure
November 19 - December 3 2016
The latest works of Jel Suarez cut through a rapid history of twentieth century sculptures: shadows, platforms, objects that were showcased at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1953. Limited selection of major works from the first half of the century were as well installed outdoors, around the museum garden, reflecting pools, against a brick wall. The exhibition was an attempt at a history of sculpture through post-war, following the movements of giants, painter-sculptors, its followers. And yet there are no masters in her mastering. She cuts through stones, clears through materials. Her cutting is an unconscious process: forming, painting, sculpting. A casual method of sculpting sculptures in the yard of masters. Suarez also continues her attraction to drapery. In a renewed legitimacy of these works, there is no subject to speak of. None of a body to refer to. The lines are bodies themselves, in the way that Nature produces her materials. Neither invisibility nor nothingness, rather, existence, existing, material, form. Sir Kenneth Clark raises: drapery, by suggesting lines of force, indicates for each action a past and a possible future.
These parts become remnants of construction that form her others, realizing the image as opposed to imagining a real. “When I try to draw or paint, nothing turns out as imagined.” For Suarez, the gesture of cutting is like remembering something familiar, creating new body/place to sense wholeness/home. “It feels composed to be abstract and lifeless.” Suarez claims it is now easier to find such abstraction in the real world. She conjures these images onto found objects: construction materials, fabric, sculptures sculpting themselves.
These formed others, in flatness and dimension, immortalize men. Like Giacometti, Suarez abandons these exterior of beings and stares directly at the monuments of modernism, moving from idealism through materialism to surrealism. The early works demanded to be as colossal as the subjects they embodied, and permanence of the material (as marble, stone) continued to echo of their impenetrability. Lipchitz reduces this as history: each artist falls heir to all that the ages before him have worked out. Throughout time, there is the accumulation of an actual. Sculptures have obscured our nature. Maillol’s search for truth. Arp believes man escapes from the origin of things because its purity reveals his own degeneration. After all that Nature has given, Rodin had invented nothing.
One of the oldest forms of art in the islands belonged to the gods. Sculptures traced their likeness, forming the mystery of an existence. This form of worship crossed over to the nobilities. From gods they shaped mortals, who mirrored the likeness: a saint, the royalty, patriots of a new world that searched for its structure. Man proved that his world was not flat. He continued to carve out his image, resting it on a plint, negotiating with the ground.
And yet the artist now sees that her world is borderline. Indefinite. Unsettled.
- Raya Martin
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