Iglesias

Cristina Iglesias
Untitled,1993
iron, alabaster, concrete

We usually experience our existential space as the objective exterior world, measurable and manageable. Such space supports our sense of being here and now. Minimalist sculpture was understood to occupy autonomously the same space as other objects. In the sculptures of Cristina lglesias, however, there is something very fragile, since she describes space with emotions, memories and thoughts, and not by means of geometrical science. Her "architectures" do not give the impression of the monumentality of churches or the solidness of contemporary concrete buildings, but rather express the desire for support, like people. That is why they most often press close to the wall of an exhibition space, or lose their weight and terrestrial stand somewhere above our heads.

In his analyses, Freud frequently employed architectural terms. He used the term facade (the front of a building is usually the most decorative architectural element) to describe symptoms as the manifest form of a latent content. One would expect the decorative side of Cristina Iglesias' sculptures, the one adorned with old tapestries or imprinted floral patterns, to be displayed most prominently, in all its beauty, in an exhibitionist way. But it is this very side, which could be their facade, which faces the wall, hardly letting the viewer near. Sometimes these surfaces are so close to the wall that the beauty of their decoration can only be admired in the reflection in the glass propped against the wall. The beautiful and appealing side of the sculpture is frequently concealed behind the simple and bare front side, which is just plain concrete or iron. The construction and the ornament do not trade places, but in places with no clearly defined orientation enter the dialectic interplay between the intimate and the public. The differentiation remains merely as a reminiscence of a folding screen, the screen of the social projection of the intimate.

The architectural element most frequently used in the history of art as a symbol of the intertwinement of the interior and exterior worlds is the window. Through the windows of Renaissance paintings a view of a controllable and measurable landscape opens up. From the Renaissance onwards, landscapes served man's illusion of being in control of the world. They were also considered the minor of man's soul, reflecting his moods and philosophical contemplations. Post-modernism divested the subject of this privileged look. It started to impose on the viewer a feeling of being actually controlled by reality. Post-modern windows display appearance, not reality. They display the appearance formed in the conglomerate of social signs. In the works of Cristina lglesias it is glass which draws attention to windows, be it plain, smooth glass, or decorated with tiny patterns, or stained. Occasionally alabaster takes its place. These materials appear in her works regularly; sometimes merely as a glass plate, and at other times as an obvious allusion to a rectangular window. The arched forms in alabaster, resembling a closed eye-lid and attached onto the gallery wall, also remind me of an unseeing eye. Likewise, the old tapestries with landscapes on the sculptures are metaphors of the look. Mimesis has always been constructed as the depth of a landscape. Here, the tapestries with scenes from nature are used because they are reminiscent of the merely apparent transparency of two-dimensional surfaces.

When decorating the Christmas crib, people use a piece of glass to represent a lake or a brook. Cristina lglesias does not use glass to describe the appearance of other materials, but as a screen through which various experiences of appearance and reality enter the consciousness of the sculpture. Thus she does not describe water with glass, and yet water is nevertheless conjured up, since it is, like glass, transparent, changeable and temporary. In the case of water, it is the container or the river bed which determines its form, and, similarly, it is the window-frame which determines our view. The fluid look can delimit an infinite number of frames and create an infinite number of images.

I no longer recall who pointed out the etymological link between the Slovene words svetel (bright) and svet (the world). The world is (was) bright due to Cartesian reason or the divine universal light, and now post-modernism reveals how the world sheds light back upon man and the world. The stained-glass windows in many churches used to be set in such a way that light fell through them into the interior at certain times on certain spots.
The alabaster and stained-glass windows on the walls of Cristina lglesias sculptures also draw our attention to the changing light. They take into account the cyclic time, they consider the light of the day as well as the darkness of the night, thus including a natural condition. In this way they combine the profane attitude with a universal experience.

Zdenka Badovinac

(from the exhibition catalogue at the Mala galerija in 1993)