“Works in 'Teresita Fernandez: Blind Landscape' at MOCA Cleveland evoke the grandeur of the universe - Cleveland Plain Dealer”

Works in 'Teresita Fernandez: Blind Landscape' at MOCA Cleveland evoke the grandeur of the universe - Cleveland Plain Dealer

Posted:

Published: Sunday, February 13, 2011, 6:01 AM

One mark of a really good artist is that immediately after leaving an exhibition of her work, you see the world through her eyes.

That's precisely the effect New York artist Teresita Fernandez creates with her new solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.

After seeing it, you might linger in amazement over something simple and commonplace, like the pattern of newly fallen snowflakes on a car window or naked tree branches intertwining overhead.

Fernandez is a landscape artist and a sculptor who uses precisely cut sheets of aluminum or stainless steel and chunks of raw graphite or shiny glass beads stuck to a wall to evoke everything from waterfalls to leafy forest canopies, meteor showers or even the Milky Way.

Fernandez engages in a kind of artistic alchemy in which industrial materials produce sensations not unlike the sense of wonder one feels when looking at a night sky full of stars or a breeze rustling leaves in a dense patch of woods.

Her goal is to evoke the grandeur of the universe, along with a sense of the order and harmony that underlie the apparent chaos of nature.

The MOCA show features a selection of big pieces, accompanied by works of lesser heft that veer toward prettiness but still possess a delicate magnificence.

"Drawn Waters (Borrowdale)," one of the signature works in the show, conjures a waterfall with a series of flat panels of machined graphite that are fitted together on an underlying metal framework to create a geometric cascade that, when read from bottom to top, rises up from the gallery floor like the swooping neck of a black swan.

Conversely, read from top to bottom, the cascade widens as it descends, making it appear to flow down into a splashing pool, ringed by shiny boulders of crumbled graphite.

The graphite chunks contrast pleasingly with the smooth, sharply cut planes of the waterfall, with each element accentuating the properties of the other.

Most important, however, is the minimal clarity of shapes created by the entire piece, which seem to pop out against the white walls and oak floor of the gallery like a giant cutout.

Similar ideas motivate Fernandez's "Vertigo (sotto in su)," from 2007, a tapering and gently descending canopy of shiny aluminum panels cut to resemble the leaves of a dense series of trees. The work creates a sheltering, meditative space underneath, which reflects everything directly beneath it, including the viewer.

The showstopper is a vast composition called "Epic" (2009), comprising thousands of tiny chunks of graphite affixed to a long gallery wall atop thousands of collocated vertical smudges of graphite.

Viewed from close range, the work creates a startling contrast between the two-dimensional smudges and the hard, shiny chunks of graphite. Both seem to have been fused to the wall in a single, cataclysmic natural event, like the explosion of a volcano. The smudges hint at some remote, overarching force that blew all the tiny bits and pieces onto the wall from a single direction.

Viewed from a distance, the dots and smears of graphite coalesce to create an overall pattern resembling wisps of smoke, or perhaps clusters of galaxies wheeling away in the vastness of space. Not surprisingly, according to an essay in the show's catalog by New York artist and critic Gregory Volk, "Epic" was inspired by artistic and literary accounts of a spectacular meteor shower in the eastern United States in 1833.

Fernandez, 42, a native of Miami now based in New York, is working some very familiar artistic territory, but in a refreshing and original way. In a word, she's exploring the idea of the sublime, a time-honored artistic concept.

In common parlance, sublime means highfalutin', as in noble or exalted. In the scholarly patois that flows through art-history departments and exhibition catalogs, "sublime" carries a host of associations centering on the mixture of wonder, terror and excitement that comes from confronting something vastly greater than oneself, such as a hurricane, an avalanche or a spectacular sunset.

To experience the sublime is to revel in the smallness of being human in a vast universe or to marvel at the equally infinite smallness of complex worlds that can be glimpsed through microscopes or atom-smashing supercolliders.

Classic expressions of the artistic sublime range from J.M.W. Turner's "Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons" to Frederic Edwin Church's "Twilight in the Wilderness" at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Fernandez brings to this tradition a mixture of influences ranging from the Earth Art of the 1960s and '70s to the Minimalism of artists such as Richard Serra.

Like the examples in which her work is rooted, she stresses the natural properties of raw materials applied in a simple, direct manner. She also revels in patterns arrayed across large walls.

Fernandez's interest in bigness and raw materials is part of a genealogy of artistic ideas rooted ultimately in the work of the Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock, who reveled in the idea of the sublime and who once reportedly declared, "I am nature."

The scale and crispness of Fernandez's imagery seem naturally suited to permanent or semipermanent application in architectural settings, as public art. This makes it no surprise to discover in the show's catalog that Fernandez had indeed created such installations.

The risk in her work is that it has an underlying delicacy that could make it easily overwhelmed or co-opted unless it were installed in an environment as rigorously controlled as an art gallery. It appears to require a clean, calm, neutral setting to produce the desired effect of awe.

Inside MOCA, however, there's little doubt that Fernandez has succeeded. If you see the show, don't be surprised to find yourself soon afterward thinking twice for a moment before switching the wiper blades to clear the windshield of snow.

"Teresita Fernandez: Blind Landscape" is up through Sunday, May 8, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, 8501 Carnegie Ave. Admission is $4. Go to mocacleveland.org or call 216-421-8671.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Collateral Damage - WikiLeaks In The Crosshairs.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Meteor

Sunday, February 13, 2011