Rosario López

Casas Riegner. Bogota

By Halim Badawi | November 07, 2010

Between 12 August and 2 October, 2010, Casas Riegner Gallery, Bogotá is hosting the exhibition “Rosario López: lo informe y el límite” (Rosario López: the shapeless and the limit), in which the Colombian artist presents her most recent production. López returns to the gallery after having featured, in 2005, her work Abismo (Abyss), the result of an investigation creation project supported by the National University of Colombia. In 2007, the mentioned work was included in the Venice Biennial.

Maqueta de poliedros, 2010. Gesso, dimensions variable/Yeso, dimensiones variables. Courtesy/Cortesía Casas Riegner Gallery / Photo/Foto: Oscar Monsalve.

On this occasion, the artist is showing several photographs and installations in an exhibition structured as a space that will allow a conversation between the spectator and the works, a space where the visitor constructs the sense of the voids. In addition to the investigation about the notion of frontier and its implications with respect to the territory, the exhibit reflects the intention, palpable in some of the photographs, to thor- oughly analyze the notion of drawing, pursuing it and finding it in the forms that exist in nature. With regard to the models, they allude to the play of scales, a process that is implicit in a large part of the shapes in artistic creation. A discovery takes place between the construction of the model and its execution at actual size, a process that permits a broadening vision.

In the Plasticines, the artist continues her research on the void, or as she puts it, “the void of the void”. The process of elaboration of these works begins with the construction of polyhedrons in gesso; then a rubber silicone is made, and forms are made from ice. These ice pieces are introduced in a geometric cardboard cube, filling it to the upper end. The hot Plasticine is poured into the cube, filling the empty spaces between the ice pieces and melting them at the same time. As a result, after attempting to fill the gaps between the ice pieces, a void is left (left by the melted ice) between the pieces of Plasticine which is already cold, evincing an effort to grasp the ungraspable, to explain the ineffable, the impossibility to materialize something.