[Image: Angela de la Cruz, installation view, ‘Bare’, Lisson Gallery London, July 2018, © Angela de la Cruz; Courtesy Lisson Gallery]
In a medium-size top-lit gallery just off the Edgeware Road – with its bustling traffic, delivery vans and shops selling used office furniture – is a display of painted sculptures/sculpture as paintings. At Angela de la Cruz’s new exhibition Bare (Lisson Gallery, 27 Bell Street, London; 4 July-18 August 2018) four rectangular mounts are set on the walls. Sloughing down them are metal shutter bands. The bands and frames form objects that resemble roller shutters used to cover windows of commercial properties. They are dented. Each set of bands is painted a different colour: navy blue, turquoise, burgundy, scarlet. The frames are bare aluminium. There is an inevitable redolence of grimy urban existence notwithstanding the warmth and energy of the immaculate paintwork. (The shutters were painted after deformation.)
[Image: Angela de la Cruz, Shutter (Turquoise), 2017, Oil and acrylic on aluminium, 154 x 159 x 15 cm, 60 5/8 x 62 5/8 x 5 7/8 in, CRUZ170018, © Angela de la Cruz; Courtesy Lisson Gallery]
In the centre of the space are four sculptures. Rectangular box-like forms in folded aluminium are rammed into old-fashioned steel filing cabinets. The metal is crumpled, meaning that the tall forms tilt. The outside of the forms are painted, each one in navy blue, turquoise, burgundy or scarlet, to match the shuttered forms. The insides are pristine unpainted metal. The filing cabinets remain in their original state, patinated through a legacy of use then obsolescence and neglect.
[Image: Angela de la Cruz, Crate (Turquoise), 2017, Oil and acrylic on aluminium, filing cabinet, 165 x 63 x 42 cm, 65 x 24 3/4 x 16 1/2 in, CRUZ170014, © Angela de la Cruz; Courtesy Lisson Gallery]
On the wall is the only canvas in the exhibition. Bare (Red) (2018) is a square painting with a square burgundy form is surrounded by an edge of scarlet. The front has been sliced free of its edges then reattached to the stretcher with a heavy nails pounded through each corner. There is no escape from being painting; it must go on as a mutilated painting, nearly pristine, its centre sagging slightly. It is so close to being both perfect and ruined and must go on existing in this dual state for as long as it is art. At some stage this object will cease to be art, as all art must do. Obliteration is the inevitable future for every art work, every object, every person and – eventually – all objects and humanity.
[Image: Angela de la Cruz, installation view, ‘Bare’, Lisson Gallery London, July 2018, © Angela de la Cruz; Courtesy Lisson Gallery]
This exhibition extends the artist’s continued investigation of the humbled object – the abject form. Previous pieces have been broken paintings draped over chairs, crumpled into corners, sagging off walls, concertinaed into glossy curtains, hammered into scrap wood. There is no rip, slash, trampling, nailing, stapling, crumpling, contortion or other violation that her paintings have not endured. De la Cruz’s art shows us art objects as surrogate people. It is also partly us who project our feelings on to these objects. We understand what art looks like when it is new and de la Cruz adapts her objects in clear and comprehensible ways; this means we carry in our imaginations the ideal original object as it would have looked. The Platonic ideal, as it were. Thus when we study her objects as they are now, we have the impaired reality in our eyes and the perfect originals in our minds. The pity is therefore more poignant. De la Cruz’s art succeeds by being failures by not matching their Platonic pristine states and thereby becoming embodiments of human weakness, achieving poignancy as art.
Thus the Crates stand on spindly legs like personages facing in different directions. The painted outsides of the Crates are folded around, so that we see the colour from every vantage point. On the inside we see the virgin metal. This reveals the substance of what we see and harks back to the idea of making art that is explicable and “true to materials” as the direct carvers of the abstract art in the 1930s and the Minimalist artists of the 1960s would have put it. It also related to the inclusion of the Platonic form in de la Cruz’s art. Viewers have a point of reference by which to measure how far this art has fallen from its ideal. The notable aspect of this show is that de la Cruz has given us sumptuousness alongside the sombreness. The nasty vinyl blacks, discoloured yellows and nauseating tobacco browns of her previous works remind us of the Spanish genius for ugliness. Here we have clear strong hues, immaculate surfaces and play of carefully unmodified sheet metal alongside waxy glowing painted surfaces. The reflectiveness of the metal under the paint seems to shine through the paint under strong light, though that may be an illusion. Despite the suggestion of melancholy and introspection, the art has a muted joyfulness. There is the pleasure of attractive colour, the tactility of clean surfaces and simple deformation and the satisfaction of pure states of metal and paint. There is the satisfaction of seeing Crates and Shutters in matching colours, with the scarlet and burgundy reprised in the single canvas. For the first time de la Cruz has made art which looks stronger than it looks weak. This, combined with new qualities of beauty in de la Cruz’s art, makes this exhibition the most emotionally satisfying display of her art that I have seen.
This exhibition could be seen as Angela de la Cruz at her most emotionally introspective. What we get is a masterful display of colour and forms that are generous, tactile and delicious. There is humour but circumscribed by sombreness. The group of works are acutely judged as an ensemble. Once the pieces are split up some of the charge may be lost. The pieces will function differently when separated.
If we are lucky, the artist will continue further along this line of approach.
© 2018 Alexander Adams
27 July 2018
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