Cynthia Kampelmacher
Issue #81 Jun - Aug 2011
| Argentina, Buenos Aires Güemes 2967 PB |
| Institution: |
| Nora Fisch Arte Contemporáneo |
| Eva Grinstein |
The artistic career of Cynthia Kampelmacher (Buenos Aires, 1968), has unfolded with the same discretion that characterizes her work: without much noise, firm, industrious, and delicate. Timely detected by the educated eye of Guillermo Kuitca, she has experimented with several artistic approaches, but her most decided tendency belongs to a formalist tradition inclined toward details of order and/or color. In many of her earlier works, Kampelmacher worked on paper¿photographed or drawn¿that she etched, retouched, and wrinkled in a collage-like approach. Later on, in other pieces, she organized objects in the space and added a more conceptual touch, like in, for instance, her acclaimed work entitled Formación (Formation). It consists of a pile of windshield taken from crashed cars. The web-like design created by the crash on the glass¿s surface, afterward reappeared in the intervened photographs of combined landscapes. This pointed both to continuity as well as to a change in direction. Her experiments with form and space reached their highest point with an intervention at the Museo MACRO in Rosario. Not only Kampelmacher worked in the reorganization of the archives and documents in the production office¿as she turned a private area of the Museum into an aesthetically compelling space¿but was also able to develop a sculptural proposal from the leftovers that resulted from that ¿cleaning.¿
For her solo show at the brand new Galería Nora Fisch¿an Argentine who studied and lived in New York for 20 years and is now back in Buenos Aires, where she opened a small but interesting space¿Kampelmacher revisits some of her past themes and attempts new approaches with them. In one of her installations, fourteen paintings emulate wooded foliage¿based on the veined surface of the wood that supports the works¿to construct the evoked image through the superimposition of boards of various sizes that have been placed on the floor and that alter the observer¿s point of view.
In another work, a piece of furniture is dismantled, neutralized with black paint, and placed against the corner section of a wall also painted in black, something that accentuated a rare disappearance-through-the-use-of-volume effect. But it is in a third work, a drawing turned into a sculpture, where Kampelmacher performs her most intense gesture. A paper that measures 4 meters (13.12 feet) in length is meticulously drawn to recreate the illusion of a jungle. The translucent paper¿which the artist spent hours rendering¿is then subjected to an irreversible dimpling process by which the plane becomes an uneven mass, as the lines of the drawing disappear and are replaced by shadows and abrupt borders marked by the pressure of the folds. The volume covers the remaining parts of a drawing that becomes something else. Under the effect created by the lacquer applied to the surface, the work at times looks like a rock proud of its sinuous format. Sparkling with contradiction, this false and very light rock hangs from the ceiling over the viewer¿s head, as he/she is able to contemplate it but only from a certain distance. It is perhaps because of the sense of sacrifice conveyed by this work¿a notion also present in the disassembled built-in closet placed against the wall in the back¿that Kampelmacher¿s approach appears to be delving into new territory when compared to her earlier body of work. If the windshields were silent remnants of accidents that could be imagined without the need to witness, this paper was burdened with the responsibility of being the fossil of a drawing condemned to be destroyed the moment it was completed.
http://www.artnexus.com/Notice_View.aspx?DocumentID=23113
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