Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen

Carla Arocha’s latest exhibition, “Marauders,” is made in collaboration with Belgian artist Stéphane Schraenen. Composed around Marauder, 2007, a large, semiopaque, mirrored-Plexiglas-and-stainless-steel curtain, the installation also includes a series of digital prints transferred onto the reverse side of glass; one is mounted on wallpaper. Arocha’s grounding in Minimalism, design, and geometric abstraction, specifically examples from her native Venezuela (think Carlos Cruz-Diez’s public commissions in Caracas from the ’70s), has reached maturity in this exhibition. If in previous outings, her influences weighed too heavily on her production, here her tone is lighter, sometimes even funny: The sculpture is a curtain, after all, not a veil or a wall! The photographic prints of abstract ensembles or representational images, such as numbers, hold their own against the central hanging sculpture. From different places within the gallery, the photographs are either shielded or revealed by the patterned breaks of the Plexiglas and steel. The mirrored sides of that pattern, a sort of bifurcated and rotated snowflake, cast pixels of the images throughout the gallery space, creating a rogue cinematic play between the prints and the sculpture. This interplay suggests a more complicated interest in surface as an optical effect by pushing reflection, refraction, and visibility as something more than visuality. Though Arocha and Schraenen do not reveal what that something is, the total effect is decisive and cohesive.