Shattered fluorescent minerals, illuminated by ultraviolet light, hover and spin theatrically in Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s exhibition “God’s Reptilian Finger.” These sculpted stones, carved from polystyrene, disperse light like a kaleidoscope—here, color relations are dynamically shifting. Neither plinth nor vitrine bind these minerals to the ground. Instead, the stones appear frozen and floating, as if their fall was eternally suspended within a void. Floating in the middle of the room amid these psychedelic minerals is a representation of God’s reptilian finger. What does God’s reptilian finger look like? Well, it looks like a human finger set aglow by fluorescent paint, and in this iteration it seems to possess the power of levitation.

If this sculptural arrangement is not odd enough, the first room of the gallery displays an equally disturbing array in Babylonian Fantasy (all works 2015), a series of sculpted jelly-worms. Drenched in pools of resin and shaped from polystyrene, these jelly-worms resemble wiggling amoebas. Although immobile, they suggest a serpentine movement—forms as slippery to the touch as they are elusive. On the reverse side of this work, a gold-leaf wall counters the jellied excess like a mollusk’s shell, and the formlessness of the jelly-worm is controverted by the mollusk’s fossilized exterior. The two sculptural forms, God’s Reptilian Finger and Babylonian Fantasy, stage an encounter with an inchoate state in which mineral life, reptilian appendage, and psychedelic surface combine to crystalize into a movement of primordial unrest.

— Andrew Witt