Cosmos

Celestial, otherworldly, and dreamlike evocations of the cosmos invariably elicit a sense of wonder at the immensity of the universe, exciting the imagination as it contemplates the sources and possibilities of creation. From the depths of such infinite darkness, as rendered in Tomie Ohtake’s Creation of the World series, emerge astral flashes of color and light: in the gleaming translucencies of the night, distilled for example in Roberto Matta’s Nuit courve, or more pensively in Rafael Soriano’s cerebral ship, casting in a spectral sea. Early shades of the Space Age take material form here in the telescopic etchings of David Manzur’s astronomical Series of the Cosmos and in the geometric, cut-zinc “craters” of Omar Rayo’s Aspecto lunar. For Eduardo Mac Entyre, the intangible, cosmic dimensions of geometric forms found their purest expression in the circumference of a circle, its mathematical perfection seen as divinely intelligent and optically elegant.

In grounded counterpoint to these imagings of the universe—the macrocosm—is the elemental physicality of the lived world, experienced at first hand. Fire, cataclysmic and cathartic, splices space in the work of Carlos Alfonzo, exploding through outlined geometries and partial bodies with vital, tumultuous energy. More austere in its expressionism, Manabu Mabe’s agitated scribbling flattens out the inky color field, circumscribing its blackness—galaxy or abyss—with autographic gesture and generously offsetting white space. Roberto De Lamonica’s graphic work similarly commingles different dimensions of space: crisscrossing linear networks layer betwixt and between thicker, hand-drawn lines and stacked swaths of black pigment sloping across the paper surface. Turning to the man-made and the mechanical, Rimer Cardillo’s Wood Box I and Rayo’s Fragmento de máquina ask us to grasp infinity in our own hands, to see in industrial debris and a present-day Pandora’s box a new, cosmic imaginary. Spanning the microcosmic and the galactic, the objects gathered under Cosmos remark upon the manifold scales of human experience, staging our existential connections to ourselves against the eternity and abstraction of the natural world.