Double vision
What can still be expected from colors, in a world that has lost much of its capacity to show itself, often being reduced to a sum of products and acts which, in their interlinking, make the contemporary societies function? Is it possible for us to keep talking about a reality that can be sensed, when perception is in large measure limited to the recognition of happenings without origin or destination? Estela Sokol aims to give a discrete response to this dilemma that has been making the rounds of the visual arts for a good fifty years – after all, what is Matisse after Matisse? – even while some contemporary artists have been confronting these questions with boldness.
In principle, Estela’s choices seem to contradict the decision to find a place for color in the space of current art. She refuses to paint, to use paints to cover the surfaces on which she works. The colors of her canvases and sculptures are determined solely by the industrial materials they are made of: PVC and acrylic sheets, with their aseptic and homogenous tones.
Estela Sokol refuses to choose the colors she will work with. She limits herself to using those that she finds in these products. She does not mix pigments, she does not have a palette nor does she use media (oil, acrylic, and caustic, etc.) that help to reach the exact way to present a hue of green or yellow. Nor are there any brushstrokes in her works. In short, everything works against the association between colors and subjectivity. Even though, ultimately, the artist seeks to revert the given character of the colors of the materials used.
In her previous and current works, Estela has already revealed a certain discreetness in working with colors. In many of them, the paints she uses – in general phosphorescent – can only be observed indirectly, through their reflection on the walls or through the openings in the geometric shapes. It is as though we have only a faded memory of a red or yellow, echoes of a world in extinction. The more ostensible presence of volumes on which the paints are applied points to the prevalence of geometric forms over the aspects (the colors) that could reduce their imposing presence, while the regularity of the sculptures is counterbalanced with the intensity of the surfaces that partly revert the excessive presence of the three-dimensional elements. Nevertheless, even in their fragility, the reflected colors point to an intense reality, forces that refuse to be crystallized in rigid outlines, leaving open the possibility of constantly renewed appearances.
Thus, it makes sense that, on first sight, her works seem to oscillate between a half-constructivist and half-pop aesthetics. In Estela Sokol’s works, the subtle interplay between rigorous forms and banal materials seeks to attain new modes of appearance, an experiment that would account for a highly domesticated reality, with its limits and possibilities.
The constructive movement’s penchant for order – present above all in the cubes of this exhibition, which explicitly refer to the works by Franz Weismann and Willys de Castro – is realized in a way that introduces new questions in the rigor of the geometric solids on which the artist intervenes. The areas covered or constructed with colored acrylic sheets clearly reveal the tight link – at least for the perception, which is what counts here – between the very impersonal geometric shapes and the materials from which they are made. Far from only completing or covering the area extracted from the cube of white marble, the acrylic constructions appear as a separate reality.
Instead of seeking to introduce complexity in a sealed-off geometric solid identical to itself – as admirably done by Weissmann and Willys – Estela is concerned with obtaining a plurality that comes from the different modes through which the marble and acrylic appear. And at this point the artist’s sensibility was decisive to identify the different perceptive dimensions that the materials acquire, depending on the cultural contexts in which they arise and the tradition that has built up around them.
The marble’s nobility – an adjective that is rarely associated with other types of stone – certainly derives from its use in sculpture, especially in its academic unfoldings. In a cultural environment where the crudeness of matter is exemplarily opposed to the incorporeal character of the soul, the only material that can be considered noble is that which, by its use, can hardly be noticed, since it allows the sculptural form to almost completely sublimate its appearance. For their part, the acrylic sheets have always been a cheap (and vulgar) substitute for more refined materials: glass, crystals and precious stones. Nevertheless, if the artist had opted for sheets of transparent acrylic, the result would not have been as effective as that obtained with the colored sheets. And this is not only due to the doubtful taste of the colors of these industrial sheets, but also to the lower visibility of the transparent sheets. It was with good reason that many constructivists – Naum Gabo, for example – used them often: their transparence clearly revealed the sharpness of their designs.
The use of two such very distinct materials questions the relation of complementarity between the areas constructed by them. The aspect of a store showcase conveyed by the acrylic regions forces the marble to reveal the diversity of its constitution, and it is thus shown in a new way in the context of art, oscillating between the appearance of a floor and wall covering, or a simple kitchen counter. The angular association between them makes it possible to observe them in a way as they would rarely be seen in daily life. And the scratch covered with powdered pigment in the upper part of the marble is nearly didactic in how it evinces the somewhat violent operation that removed the marble and acrylic from their repose and concealment.
On the other hand, the pop-artish appearance of her paintings – made with the overlaying of PVC sheets, that is, based on procedures similar to those present in her sculptures – gradually acquires a nearly constructive dimension, insofar as the industrial and entirely straightforward aspect of the materials used is progressively reverted by the superposition of various layers of PVC, which by their transparence (or opacity) establish subtle and variegated surfaces that recall the tradition of glazings in painting, an important element in Renaissance art.
And that which could appear as a paradox – the approximation of two opposing aesthetic movements, constructivism and pop art – reveals above all the freedom with which Estela Sokol approaches the history of art. Because what interests her is not a choice of one or another movement; rather, she is driven precisely by the understanding of the historical limits of each of them and the ends to which this understanding can be applied.
The fact that the artist uses the traditional format of paintings in these works could, in principle, hinder her attempt to find a new status for the colors. But Estela wanted to take this risk precisely because paintings are the privileged place for their use and, therefore, they can also allow for a differentiated perception on what takes place on their surfaces. And, without a doubt, the PVC sheets can hardly be confused with paint-filled areas. And this is due not only to their more pronounced material aspect. Their consistency – both in the case of the opaque sheets as well as the translucent ones – results in a different relation with light than what takes place on the painted surfaces. The PVC sheets have a somewhat “pointillated,” somewhat wrinkly texture that makes them reflect light in a less orderly way, and this also contributes to our sense that we are looking at something outside the pictorial tradition. Moreover, the fact that light can pass through the more translucent surfaces gives the colors a softer appearance, since the light is not immediately reflected.
Nevertheless, it is the artist’s ability to obtain different effects based on very similar elements that allows her to revert the banal appearance of the material used. In this exhibition, the colored PVC sheets acquire multiple visualities. Otherwise, they would easily tend to establish a pattern that would pacify them, bringing them back once again to the world of things.
At some moments, Estela creates very subtle tonal passages, near to solutions of great modern painters, such as Morandi or Volpi. In other works, the overlaying of the sheets produces an ambiguous result, surfaces with uncertain colors that practically prevent us from identifying what is going on in the plane of the paintings. And there are furthermore the paintings in which the differentiations of color are more accentuated – recalling the canvases by Eduardo Sued in the 1980s – thus lending the colors a joy that is difficult to find in common store merchandise.
If the clashing with constructivism has allowed Estela Sokol to question the solidity of rigorously formalized objects through the rough contact with everyday and pop-like materials, the formal subtlety of the constructivists has allowed her to achieve an unsuspected presence for materials that were previously involved with the creation of banal objects, hardly able to enrich our perception of the world. And, if the artist has consciously refused to realize her works through more traditional media – painting, the use of mutually compatible materials, the expressivity of gestures, etc. – one would be mistaken to see any preconception or mannerism in her decisions.
The challenge that she has posed for herself – without which, I believe, she would never have achieved the notable results she has obtained – has ultimately become a decisive element of her poetics. In the conjunction of noble and banal processes and materials, the observer can glimpse the possibility of experiencing the world in a different and enriching way, based on a reactivation of colors that considers their current, diminished and flat condition, though without being resigned to this. And for this the artist needs to be discreet. Instead of regretting the situation in which we live, Estela Sokol prefers to find new possibilities for experience. The reality we perceive in her works is charged with the ambiguities of the world in which we live. Nature can be a threat. But what can its excessive domestication be?
Rodrigo Naves