The sculptor June Crespo creates forms in tension. Her assemblages and installations are constructed out of natural and synthetic materials of resin, textiles, clothing, metal and concrete. But the works oscillate between figuration and abstraction, between realms that seem cast by the real – an imprint of a drain, for instance –yet which hover in imaginary spaces. Her forms seem bent out of place and out of joint. Crespo speaks of translating physical affects and imaginary landscapes, and there is an affective tendency in her work that is skilfully articulated. One recurring technique that Crespo makes is by a resourceful placement of vertical and horizontal material: the totemic build-up of matter, for instance, recalling graves or sites of memorial; or their horizontal placement, recalling bodies at rest. In one recent sculpture, presented in her project SH/ Fuerzas Felices Crespo placed a ghostly remnant of human fabric, which was hung off a totem-like concrete block – eerie, to me it recalled skins, flayed bodies, or even the memorializing of the departed, or the casts of war or human conflict.
Crespo’s works are made of poised assemblages of cast and human-made objects that are both rough and contain the cohesion of gravity. They are concerned with the human body and its perception with textures and with joints, with joining and dis-joining; a recent sculpture series employs melted bottles. The works recall the human body’s own spaces for construction as well as connection and passage: tubes within tubes. She is interested in systems – the circulation of forms, affects and fluids, their translations within material and imaginary spaces.
In one series, Chance Album, vintage-looking magazines are sprawled open and placed within a cage-like space on the wall – contained and exposed. Extending from these were pieces of thin, elongated metal tubing that recalled a fishing pole; and pieces of abstract resin. In a separate series, she uses the existing architecture of a room: the radiators of a room, for instance, which are placed with crafted-looking tubular artefacts in different colours, or the image of a head. The results are eerie in how they speak to systems: natural systems of biology – of circulation or digestion – but also the architectural systems of buildings, energy, to larger systems such as the passage of time and the circulation of matter.
Pablo Larios, independent writer and art critic
