Flowers, cement and the tree on which you grew
As we visit the exhibition, part of
June Crespo’s work occupies the space between the grey floor and the white walls. It is made of resin, iron, plaster and cement. The other part has to do with daily life in her Amsterdam studio, with her dreams, with anthropology, with Clarice Lispector and art history, especially female art history. Understood as the sum of narrative and objects, with a greater
or lesser input from intuition and chance, her sculptures and assemblages exist between these two universes.
As we prepare to assemble the exhibit, we open two purpose-built wooden boxes and, very carefully, meticulously, start taking out all the elements and placing them on the floor. Inside a tube we find the different size colour photographs of close-ups of the body that Crespo has been taking, fragmented images that
serve as a counterpoint to more solid objects or volumes. In a separate box we find some old magazines, specifically issues of Avant-Garde (1968–1971),
a New York magazine critical of the government and American society, with allusions to explicit sexual themes and psychedelia. Next to the magazines we find some A4 plastic folders containing dried flowers and dust from the studio. There is also a box with six glasses, some glass holders, and very fragile shapeless pieces of black resin. Outside the box we find two steel rods about three metres long. From the van we take two radiators: those with a single rectangular plate typically used in northern Europe. These are just some of the elements that will form part of two of June Crespo’s works, Chance Album (Isa) and Chance Album (Queen).
From a formalist point of view, Crespo produces a series of
spatial volumes that contradict yet simultaneously reaffirm the idea of a block—deeply formal yet eschewing
a definitive form through the use of remains, leftovers and fragments of other objects or earlier works. All the points that are not immediately visible—the places that touch the floor—are minutely studied to occupy space through omission.
The spatial perception of each work and of the specific place in which it is displayed is key, as it offers a balance between intuition and the conception
of the work in space. Each irregular distribution of the mass of the works
is minutely studied to create a type of visual syntax between all the elements. The structural relationships and contrasts, such as physical and formal qualities, are associated with emotions, with physical sensations or with a type of thought that has no interest in constructing a rational or logical meaning. What we see is an on-going internal dialogue that is materialised in the combinations and relationships between the objects the artist proposes. From her printed and scanned images to the more voluminous structures, Crespo’s work always evidences extreme rigour and precision regarding the position of each element in space, which must be studied and pondered calmly, step by step, during a long and unhurried process of changes through trial and error. It is as if all the materials and forms were in need of sleep and time, of a nocturnal stage,
in order to achieve their final form.
The radiator is the centrepiece of Chance Album (Isa). It has to be placed at exactly the same height as the radiators in Crespo’s studio: sixteen centimetres from the floor. Once it is in the correct place, one of the photos will be hung
on it with magnets. This photo contains an assemblage in itself, as it shows a woman’s ear with a gold hoop earring and shaven head and, on top of this, some copper tubes and lavender twigs. It is a composition that blurs the boundaries between what belongs to the first photograph and what is superimposed on the floor, almost randomly, yet creating
a concrete, well-balanced geometric composition. Crespo will then add the plastic pockets of dust and dried flowers.
The dust brought from the studio is an image of the passage of time, of the accumulation of works created at an earlier time, which resurface in the next work, creating a body of work that can be repeated ad infinitum.
Nothing is random, but neither does the artist use specific measurements
or diagonals. Rather, she distributes forces through variables such as balance, tension, resistance and pressure.
The invisible characteristics that the image of the radiator invokes, like
heat, the circulation of fluids or the communication between these elements and the body, are crucial for Crespo.
In her latest works she has included references to the private dimension
of her life, which for the last year has unfolded in Amsterdam. The content
of these details is present, but always
in modified form. The structural and functional elements, like pipes, hinges and heating systems, convey information and alternately open and close gates to subjectivity. Viewed from a different perspective, water, light and gas also symbolise everyday life as formless structures. The pipes serve both as a record of Crespo’s daily environment,
on a life-size scale, and as an image of joints or conduits that carry vital internal (bodily) and external (water, gas and electricity) substances. Thus, the dust from the studio, the gas and the flowers are part of an organic universe that is only referenced by forms and volumes.
The remaining elements will form Chance Album (Queen). The glass holders will be the main structure, on which
all the other objects will be balanced. However, hardly any of these will be anchored, so there will always be an element of danger, of something that is about to break. Their form and original function recall the first readymade, Marcel Duchamp’s empty bottle rack, which when stripped of its usefulness became an indefinite iron structure. Next, the two thin iron bars will be installed to display the magazines, open at pages showing highly sensual images, but in dark tones similar to the formless pieces of resin placed between them. Rooted either in psychedelia or abstraction, each element seems to eschew a definitive form in contrast to the geometry of the glass holders. The manner in which the found objects are displayed, in modified form and with a symbolic intentionality,
is reminiscent to a certain extent of surrealist gestures. Although the work contains several layers related to art history, any hint of nostalgia is lost, subsumed by other elements associated with the artist’s everyday life. Neither the dark and rather industrial colour palette nor the layout of the elements invoke fetishism or a nod to history. On the contrary, they eradicate them completely. Indeed, the two glasses about to break accentuate this even more, alluding to the fragility of the passage of time.
Adopting a fragile stance is quite symbolic and liberating. After all, the construction of gender roles is still very evident in the traditional categories of sculpture and painting. In earlier works
by June Crespo, the female body usually appears mutilated, fragmented between several layers of cement in order to reveal its fragility. In the work Daytime Regime (Brigitte), made in 2015, the face of Brigitte Bardot that appears on the cover of Nova magazine is crushed by a block
of concrete. Thus, we are deprived of
the complete vision that would enable us to recognise the 1960s sex symbol—we
are only given a hint of her mouth and perfect lips. In later works none of the blocks shaped like jeans-clad buttocks balance one on top of the other in a sensual position (Cheek to Cheek, 2015); or we
see prostheses of athletic bodies, almost like leftovers that have disintegrated,
and dirty T-shirts minus the body (Soft/ Hard, 2016). Another important element
is the relationship between the surface and the interior, which is glimpsed through a lateral gap and makes other parts invisible, as well as the relationship between the vertical and horizontal volumes, which
is always minutely studied.
In general, all of Crespo’s sculptures reference the body as an object. The
idea of the object-portrait that appears in certain dada and avant-garde assemblages holds great interest for her. In its day, this had to do with mechanical symbolism and the portraits usually bore no relation to their subjects. The new approach to portraits was no longer based on mimesis but incorporated words, images, shapes and, sometimes, superimposed found objects to signify the distinctive attributes of each individual. The controversial baroness Elsa von Freytag, an iconoclast of the traditional notions of gender, sexuality and identity, provides us with a good example of this approach. One of her main sculptures, God (1917), a piece of iron plumbing placed upside down on top of a wooden mitre box, already presaged the mechanisation of the modern age and the loss of the body in favour of the machine. Another of her works, the sculpture Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1920), was made of mechanical parts, feathers, chicken bones, a glass and fish hooks. In relation to this random association, Crespo has created the composition of sculptures entitled Laranja na mesa. Bendita a árvore que te pariu [Orange on the Table. Bless
the Tree on Which You Grew], which references the poem entitled “Amor a terra” by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector.[1] This work consists of a series of small, tubular ceramic sculptures occupying the entire surface of the
floor. It is difficult to view them as a whole since they are extremely fragile and vary slightly, almost randomly,
both in form and size. Like Lispector’s naked words, Crespo’s work attempts to express with a limited medium something that is much greater than language, something that is nameless, that reaches beyond the rational terms of what the eyes perceive from a quasi-physical sensuality. As Lispector wrote, alluding to the limitations of language and what lies beyond, “The word has terrible limitations. And beyond those limitations lies organic chaos. After the end of the word begins the great eternal scream”.[2]
Prostitutes, ladies of the tropical aristocracy, threesomes, a dismembered corpse, carnival masks and animals all make an appearance in this fragmented literature of tales and short stories, which also contains many of the ordinary and seemingly banal elements we find in the daily life of women from every social class and context, and where the visceral and lunar encounter the commonplaces of the city or the inside of a home. Just as it occurs in June Crespo’s universe, where it is impossible to understand one part without the other as she gives form to a tense balance, creating volumes from the void and a special relationship with the word as a portrait of the artist.
Rosa Lleó, independent curator founder of The Green Parrot, Barcelona
[1] “One only has to look at the portrait of Clarice Lispector to admire the physical beauty of that mysterious, distant, unattainable woman with a trace of irony in her gaze, like made of intimate porcelain; aloof but open to complete dreams” (Miguel Cossío, “De Clarice”, in Clarice Lispector. Cuentos reunidos [Madrid; Siruela, 2008], p. 21).
[2] See Elena Losada Soler, “Clarice Lispector. La palabra rigurosa”, in Mujeres y literatura (Barcelona: PPU, 1994) (available at: https://pendientedemigracion.ucm.es/info/ especulo/numero4/lispecto.htm [accessed 19-11-2016]).
