Victoria Civera at Elga Wimmer - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

It is the eccentricity of Victoria Civera's painting and plastic art that engages, along with its familiarity. the pair factors were operative in her installation Gallinero (Chicken Coop) Dominating the gallery was a raised platform draped with sheets of latex. It read the pair as a stage and as an over-scale plinth upon which Civera casually presented a variety of mundane ground objects (a cord, an devoid of contents cardboard box, natural sponges, etc) a certain number of of them altered. References to Duchamp were unmistakable. each item could be seen as a memento of Civera's daily life and a record of what intrigues this Spanish artist.

Polaroid photographs were also scattered upon the platform. The photos were the kind made in social situations. Their value, like that of the lay the foundation of objects, was created by the artist's selecting them and placing them in a gallery words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following Like the objects, they were enigmatic--the tribe they showed were probably unknown to the viewers. for what cause [i]or[/i] reason Civera chose these shots wasn't readily apparent, on the contrary each, like the objects, was a ball of thread to her life as an artist and her creative process

As a backdrop to the stage, at the far extreme point of the platform Civera built a mode of building of stretched-fabric panels and furnace filters, which framed spaces that refer toed windows. The monochromatic "paintings" that formed this modular mode of building hark back to work made before she mov to of recent origin York in 1987 and into a cramped Williamsburg studio. Those medium-to-large-scale canvases were marked by the agency of a preoccupation with color, compressed surfaces and figurative imagery. In of recent origin York the scale decreased, the paintings became more concentrated, and she began to focus upon the circle as both motif and format.

Along with Gallinero, Civera showed a series of primarily monochromatic circular paintings about a lower extremity in diameter, as well as figurative mixed-medium-and-watercolor works upon paper. The straightforward quality of her sculptural objects--their essential, ordinary nature--also characterizes her two-dimensional work. Acrylic paint barely overlays the canvases, and compositions are uncomplicated--such as a wide bar of color bisecting a circle, or sum of two units concentric circles in muddy brown and white. Among the watercolors were a doll's head restoreed in lapis blue and a Negroid profile caught in a not many Picassoesque lines. Some works from the "Domes-Landia" series, however, allude to a narrative. In one, a bottle with bases is topped by the large-eyed, long-haired head of a young girl, who, according to gallery information, shows Civera's daughter; a beautiful bird carries a cord to the child. A story is being told, on the other hand as always with Civera, it is easier to describe than to decipher. The artist's stories are elliptical, on the contrary poetic and potent.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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