Praxis Gallery, NY
The abstraction, the dream, are as limited for me as the concrete and the real. What to do? Show a part of it only, in a narrow mirror, as if it were the whole?
— Claude Cahun, Disavowals
Fragments of Presence reunites the work of Sofía Quirno, Elisa Lutteral and June Canedo de Souza, exploring the interconnections within the inner, unconscious world, and the perceived reality. Approaching space, psyche, and the body through varied mediums and formats, these artists infuse reality with a dreamlike quality, showing how a deeper sense of presence emerges from an interplay of both aspects.
Sofía Quirno’s painting, Remedios, layers scenes and spaces drawn from memory, offering a new scenario that amalgamates everyday mental associations with reality. A homage to the Mexican surrealist artist Remedios Varo, the work depicts the moon over a dark sky, framed with a circular portal or window at the center of the canvas. A warm ochre panel and a checkered floor, rendered in black and gray, surround the scene placing it into a domestic space. To the left, a red plant sits near a large window while the bottom of the canvas remains white, punctuated by a few minimal, almost abstract shapes. Quirno’s painting dialogues with a series of her sculptures, displayed on a mobile pedestal at the center of the room. These works, reminiscent of readymades, are assembled from objects drawn in daily life: a brush covered in scraps of canvas; a pot found in the artist’s studio; a wood beam from her side job. By collaging different objects together, Quirno takes her practice into a new medium, translating the associations of her inner world present in her paintings into three-dimensional objects.
Using textile as her primary medium, Elisa Lutteral expands its traditional format to create pieces that explore and question how meaning and power are constructed. Her piece A moment of silence or a millennia of silencing, which also takes the form of an assemblage, features a fiber membrane stretched within a frame. Embedded within are a limb made of meticulously stitched fabric scraps, a constructed female torso held together with medical suture, a wool glove, textured patterns, vegetal forms and strands of horse hair, all stitched, woven, and assembled through the piece. The organic feeling provided by the natural fibers and the constellation of fragmented elements evoke the sense of a female body caught mid-transformation. Through the process of stitching and sewing, the artist unfolds how bodies, especially female bodies, can be projected, distorted, created, or controlled. These fragmented pieces, with their surreal and spectral anatomy, evoke the body in all its transformations, holding space for its many possibilities.
June Canedo de Souza’s sculptural paintings originate from initial drawings she makes directly on the canvas. Nonetheless, these preliminary marks are quickly covered by multiple layers of oil, obscuring their original form and shape. From the outset, de Souza recognizes that her initial idea will not fully translate through drawing alone, recognizing that achieving the desired piece often requires moving beyond aesthetic preconceptions. The two paintings Rib Bones and Couples Therapy, as well as the prints Sitting Bones —featuring soft, abstracted forms rendered in muted tones and dense black marks— hover between abstraction and figuration. In one, a gray shape tinged with pink and outlined in black resembles a wing resting on a row of striking yellow circles that evoke a ceiling; in another, an oval form suggests a roughly rectangular or house-like silhouette. The final pieces, rich in texture and character, only take shape through the artist’s full mental and physical immersion in the process. For de Souza, painting is a deeply spiritual experience that demands profound perceptual engagement.
Throughout her career, Claude Cahun merged reality with dreams, using photography, performance, and text in an attempt to unveil “the whole.” Yet that totality could never be captured through a single medium or form, it demanded a multiplicity of expressions and narratives. Echoing Claude Cahun’s question of how to reveal “the whole”, the artists in Fragments of Presence navigate the intricate relationship between inner perception and external reality through diverse mediums. Rather than offering a definitive truth, Sofía Quirno, Elisa Lutteral, and June Canedo de Souza propose ways of inhabiting multiplicity, revealing how a deeper sense of presence emerges from the interplay of fragmented, layered, and often elusive elements.
— Exhibition text by Montserrat Miranda Ayejes.
