Alice Cattaneo’s third solo exhibition at this gallery seems like a treatise on how to create equilibrium between unstable forms. Six sculptures, distributed among the gallery’s three rooms, are concretions of mostly white and black elements: metal rods, woven wire mesh, plastic, foam board, and nylon strings. These are assembled into compositions that are made possible by a single catalyzing agent––the artist’s hand––although one might wonder whether the sculptures are actually held together by something else, perhaps a special mathematical relationship that the artist intuited.
One might also say that these works are temporary architectures ready to evolve into an infinite amount of possibilities. Or, perhaps, that they are windows inviting the viewer to reconsider the exhibition space from new viewpoints. And yet they also underscore the proportional relationship between the space and the people within it.
The show concludes with a video installed in the last room: Untitled, 2009. This piece celebrates Cattaneo’s process, and it shows her creating a sculpture in New York out of wood, foam, and tape, among other materials. The video is a document of her rigorous discipline and response to unforeseen phenomena. We see her work until she deems the sculpture done.
The pieces in the show seem to hover between the necessity for control and a fascination with the unexpected. While all of the works here seem like results of a priori design decisions, this is not the case. Prior to every exhibition Cattaneo tries out her compositions in the space, making them again and again, until she feels she has attained the exact form she was seeking for each sculpture. She seems to be satisfying what we might call an idea of precise fantasy.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
