Argentina-born local fixture Santiago Cucullu’s first exhibition with the Alice Wilds, “Alta Por Fuga” (through April 20) offers vestiges of past work that may be familiar to fans, but like a goldfish, it’s grown to the size of its larger gallery setting in both scale and presence. The narratives, however, are equally complex, drawing from personal, material and social stimuli, all based in a dogged pursuit of the random connections between things and thoughts.
The installations at Wilds build from an eccentric and impressionistic mix of monumental drawings on paper climbing the high, white walls of the ample space, embedded with quirky, jewel-like ceramic works, as well as more traditional watercolors on paper. The large cut-paper wall works set the pace and mood for the exhibition. Size obviously matters here, but measurements alone can’t explain a throbbing strangeness one feels when entering the space at Alice Wilds. We don’t know initially whether we as viewers are to feel like inert bystanders or self-conscious intruders. Like Easter Island monuments, they smack as both stupidly simple and eerily sophisticated.
Even if one chooses to appreciate wall-size pieces like the Hypnotist Collector, which is derived from smaller gestural drawings, for their linear fluidity, they can’t deny a nagging feeling that those marks describe organisms struggling to free themselves. In the large cut prints, we encounter everything from (maybe) a she-wolf-like beast, a headless Pablo Picasso-esque knot of appendages and a tangled couple in full clumsy stride—all anxiously searching for literal and metaphorical emancipation. If these ambiguous lifeforms are in fact trapped, we wonder, then, whether they are caught between abstraction and figuration, between imagination and objective reality, between his and our psychological worlds or between the vibrating space between thought and action.
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The recognition of small ceramic panels in the faces of the drawings frees our expectations as we realize that these somewhat beguiling images are part of a carefully composed compositional program. At this point, they turn securely into art objects, which makes them less feral but doesn’t necessarily detract from the larger discussion. The recognition of artfulness, in fact, reinforces the point, with the forced shift in perspective emphasizing the intentions of Cucullu the artist over the phantom power of the rune-like images. This was an inevitable revelation, of course, but better that he initiated it.
A large wall drawing along the west wall punctuates the transition between states of cognition and representation by offering an illusionistic alleyway, finally blocked by more of the strange and colorful bursts of affixed ceramic works, which are individually remarkable but ultimately engulfed by the installations. When our headspace is interrupted, we turn back to the artist’s relationship to his subject matter and the stumbling difficulty in trying to image mental impressions slipping between states of seeing and thinking.
Cucullu’s vibrant watercolors, which many will immediately identify as being by his hand, make the case for cognitive ambiguity more bluntly. As prismatically fragmented snapshots of the flickering interstices between thought and sight, they are slightly more overt. Even so, the visual stream-of-consciousness montages function almost like a key to the map of the more esoteric mental landscapes in the show.
“Alta Por Fuga” is a lot to take in in a single gulp, but so is most of the space we inhabit in the glitchy, in-between realm of mental and physical reality. We willingly gulp more reality than we can process all the time without thinking about it. If we were better at this sort of metaphysical syncing, we could dispense with all the philosophy and get on with world peace already. Cucullu sets out to trace the impossible contours of that elusive interstitial space and to somehow find a bridge between his and our versions of it. It’s a quixotic and wandering surrealism, but one that is staggering in the right direction.
