HYPER-MINIMAL: GISELA COLON

HYPER-MINIMAL

Primitive vital energies

With her very first exhibition in Brussels (and incidentally in Europe) which is hosted at the Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach, Gisela COLON rips apart the great white veil of our contemporary art world with her, let's face it, truly groundbreaking works. These extraordinary iridescent curved shapes, made of her own take on blow-molded acrylic techniques, reveal tangible futuristic anticipation, toying with our visual perception using the very properties of light. Here the infinite variations of light and color show themselves as one moves around, depending on the angle from which it is viewed. The eye is delighted while all our certitudes come crumbling down.

Gisela's work resides within the research of pure shape and color, perfectly aligned with the « Light and Space Movement » started in the early sixties by West Coast artists such as James Turell, Bruce Nauman, Craig Kauffman, Robert Irwin, etc. Gisela explores further even as she calls upon the involvement of the viewer and, through this shift, she engages the optical kinetic art of the sixties, directly inspired by Carlos Cruz Diez (to whom the gallery concomitantly devotes a significant retrospective, preci- sely due to his proximity with Gisela's work).

Through his bodily movement in front of the art piece, the looking subject modifies the looked upon object; from this dialectic between subject and object raises the notion of participative work, the viewer becomes an actor of the work of art. His very position modifies and subjectively alters the ambiguous and individual way the viewer perceives the object. The movement, which is also the time of the movement, modifies his vision: we are indeed concerned here with optical kinetic art, which introduces a fourth dimension, the Time dimension. The whole originality of Gisela Colon's work resides in this synthesis between minimalism and optical art, which we may therefore qualify as « kinesthetic ».

These essentially wall-suspended cells possess their own life from within, an organic-like capacity of mutation, an oath taken on the future, mirroring cells, placental plasmas, cosmic eggs, incredibly attractive and equally inspiring. Mesmerizing and mysterious, her works also have a soothing quality linked to archetypal vital forms, awakening deep inside our unconscious mind the image of vitality itself, a secret biology, so feminine with its rounded, maternal, comfortable, slightly undefined shapes. Some will see cells; other might see matrices or even pairs of eyes... All these womanly curves caress our retinas, tangled in an extremely seductive and appealing chromatic blur, not eluding either poetry, fantasy nor dream.

These pure shapes and celestial colors borrowed from the rainbow are philosophical projections of a single thought whose sole purpose is to solve itself, allowing perception in its purest form, as it becomes disembodied from all functions, to be its own justification. But it would be quite reductive to consider Gisela Colon's work as a simple manifestation of a state of perception, as a materialistic phenomenology aiming to induce wonderment or esthetic satisfaction. Far beyond these considerations, it's about detecting the intricacies of life, questioning the mysterious creative energy of the Big Bang, which here is little more than light, in a primitive explosion of colors.

With this exhibition, Gisela Colon asserts her status as a demiurge artist, not unlike Râ, this Egyptian god whose light maintains the circle of life. What finer reference can be given to an artist than that of the god who created the first civilization?

– Constantin Chariot

GISELA COLON

(Canada, b. 1966) is an American contemporary artist who has developed a unique sculptural language of "organic minimalism," breathing life-like qualities into reductive forms. Originally from Puerto Rico, Colon's diverse background brings a cross-cultural approach to her practice. Colon's organic forms embody qualities of energy, movement and growth, merging the industrial with the natural. Colon's sculpture resides in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; Castellani Art Museum, Niagara, NY; Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO; Grand Rapids Museum of Art (GRAM), Grand Rapids, MI; Palm Springs Art Museum (PSAM), Palm Springs, CA; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; and the Fredrick R. Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, amongst others. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.