Zsófia Keresztes
Sprout, 2024
Stainless steel, glass mosaic, fabric, textile dye, thread, construction adhesive, fiberglass, polyurethane
140 x 100 x 70 cm | 55 x 39 x 27 in
An infant plunging its hands into a jar of honey gets instantly involved in contemplating the formal properties of solids and liquids and the essential relation between the subjective experiencing self and the experienced world. Viscous, halfway between solid and liquid. A cross-section in a process of change. Unstable, oozing. Soft, yielding, and compressible. Its stickiness is a trap, it clings like a leech; it disintegrates the boundary between its own substance and it. Nowhere near the experience of water. It is about to dilute itself into viscosity.
Cassina Projects is excited to present Viscous, the latest group show at the gallery featuring works by María Fragoso Jara (*1995), Wang Haiyang (*1984), Zsófia Kerestzes (*1985), Jessie Makinson (*1985) and Oda Iselin Sønderland (*1996).
Building upon a synesthetic parallelism with the tactile experience of viscosity, the exhibition mines the intersection of aesthetics and psychology where the theatrical uncanny is the adopted code to navigate contemporary libidinal frameworks.
Obscure, throbbing and palpable, the works on show toy with the grotesque and the immoral, straddle the tender and the hedonistic as they bend the connecting arc between history and post human.
Through his sleek, explicit acrylic touch, in Time, Space, Memory, and Sunyata and Blue Pill, Wang Haiyang dismantles heteronormative conceptions of what is to be considered orthodox in the fluid constitution of sexual identity. Voyeuristic and suspended, metamorphic and disquieting, these two sophisticated works mine the blind spot between innocent desire and arresting shame.
Also staged in a time bending theatrical dimension across past and future, To the sugar on the strawberries by Jessie Makinson flirts with a melange of references spanning sci-fi, medieval folklore, enchanted fairy tales, Renaissance painting and mythology. Aloof and intimate at the same time, discrete yet sly, the outdoor scene features an ensemble of androgynous figures exquisitely depicted, their patterned bodies and lax postures mediating the human and the animalistic, the lascivious and the vigilant, the ritualistic and the off-hand.
Nido by María Fragoso Jara is testament to empathy as the pivotal force which unlocks the artist’s imagery. A decorated vase set against a backdrop of sanguine hues is home to a group of tiny plump hybrid creatures conjuring a simulacrum of ex voto where animal forces, human nature and objecthood coexist. In her painting but also in her exquisite work on paper titled Ex voto para una madre, symbology and allegory are key signifiers as Fragoso makes a religious undertone to the sexual dimension palpable.
Tension and contradiction spill out of surreal sculptures Sprout and Remains of Tenderness by Zsófia Kerestzes. Shiny glass mosaics weave in and out of fabric, her fleshy anthropomorphic forms straddling the sensual and the virtual, the immutable archaic and the ever-shifting fluid present. The perfect symmetry evokes the dualism between our persona and our digital version, whereas the organic materiality unpacks the geology of identity oscillating between individual journey and collective experience.
Imbued with a melancholic aura, three watercolor paintings by Oda Iselin Sønderland dig the subconscious and question the cause-and-effect model which tends to encapsulate universal feelings within logical structures. Archetypal female characters often protagonise her intuition-based tableaux as she alludes to themes of puberty, sexuality, physical desire and romanticized spiritual connection.
Towering white curtains softly section the space. Architectural yet also ornamental, the ephemeral transparency of the partition reconciles what is concealed and what is revealed.