Between Nature and Culture
Poetics of Materials and Objects

Catalogue essay for Florencio Gelabert’s exhibition
Ambrosino Gallery, Miami
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Panama
Museo Jacobo Borges, Venezuela
Museo de Arte y Diseno Contemporaneo, Costa Rica
April 1998

The apocalypse of the closing years of the 20th century displays a distinct reversal of roles. The forces of nature, which in previous centuries represented for man the executive arm of the deity, have become the victims of man, their new lord, who plays havoc with them, threatens to annihilate them, and thus cuts down the branch on which he sits. Disturbing data are heard more and more frenquently: In 1991, the earth’s population increased by 92 million people and 17 million hectares of forest were destroyed. About 140 species of animals become extinct every day. 630 million people are starving, while huge resources are invested in raising livestock for the food industry. Absurdly, these animals consume almost two-thirds of the global grain crops, destroy pasture lands and forests, and the surplus of their droppings – which the soil can no longer absorb – is poisoning the air we breathe with nitrogen, one of the causes of acid rain.

Due to the shortage of land and water, the use of chemical fertilizers, and the lethal air pollution, food production has declined considerably. Global warming (“the greenhouse effect”, “the death od the oceans”, and recently, the mysterious calamities brought about by El Nino) also has a harmful effect on crops, not to mention the ultraviolet rays penetrating the ozone-torn atmosphere. In addition to the aforementioned, there is the damages caused by satellites and rocket launcher radiation and the slow poisoning resulting from the chemical leftovers in the fast food we consume. Environmentalists maintain that only an environmental revolution, on the scale of the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago and the industrial revolution of 200 years ago, may save the planet from ecological catastrophe.

These alarming givens are the starting point that unlies Florencio Gelabert’s motivation in his current show. Only that the very title of the show, Sound of Forest, already attests to a choice of another strategy: neither by revolution, nor by way of shock does Gelabert wish to express his opinions and anxieties, but rather through silent, personal and sensitive protest, as intimate as writing a poem. In the current exhibition, the poetic direction of his work is encapsulated in only seven works, which serve as a personal, subjective and refined channel to convey the sound of the forest.

And the forest is, of course, a wider metaphor for the grand concept of “nature”. The artist’s identification with nature can be perceived through the anthropomorphic scale: 6 feet – the artist’s body dimensions dictated the dimensions of most of the new works. Interestingly, it is precisely here, for the first time, in the least political context of his work, that human presence has infiltrated indirectly, linking to one of the most important components in sculptural work – scale. According to the Romantic conception of the 19th century, man was regarded as diminutive in view of the “sublime” embodied in Nature. In Gelabert’s work, consciously and intentionally, the romantic gap between man and nature was eliminated. Man is nature. Nature is man. This oneness is presented to the viewer as an allegory – Nature’s death is analogous to man’s death.

The explicit engagement with ecological topics is a direct continuation of Gelabert’s ongoing preoccupation with the issue of violence. In his latest large-scale solo show at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art (April-August 1997) entitled Beyond Violence, Gelabert exhibited several key works which may illuminate the meaning of his recent works and indicate the fine, subtle changes in his work since then. The show included objects and installations, most of which revolved around a central axis founded on two motifs – work tools and weapons. The clear allegorical, emblematic nature of many of the works helped the viewer draw out political meanings directly related to the oppressive regime in Cuba. A work entitled Sacred Work (1996), for instance, featured a gigantic wooden hammer painted red, cleaving a volcanic rock which was stuck in the middle of a small mound. Suspended above the hammer was a circle of sickles linked together, handle to blade, like an aura of holiness.

Despite Gelabert’s explicit denial and his avoidance of a direct reading of the work in the Cuban context, one cannot refer to this work as an innocent universal symbol of an ideological clash. The cynical use of the Soviet emblem, sanctifying the value of labor (the halo), and the red power of the hammer as a symbol of oppression have triggered immediate meanings related to the regime in Cuba, to violent exploitation of power and authority, and to the corruption of utopian thought. Other objects in the exhibition – axes, knives, armors, and other bizarre tools which came across as torture devices – were presented as archaeological findings, as a civilization of tools, primitive technological instruments, samples of survival modes dating back to prehistoric times, relating the great drama of man-nature relations, a drama in which violence plays a central role.

Only that Gelabert’s treatment of these objects always bore an illusive nature, challenging their original meanings. At times the instrument was offered as is, as a found object, while at others it was produced by the artist from a material contradicting its function – a wooden ax, a plastic blade, or a lead tree. While the material carries the totality of symbolic meanings inherent to it, the dialectic meaning of nature and culture, the historical and the current, is reinforced by Gelabert’s deliberate shift in function.

In the current show, this contrast between the real and the imaginary is intensified, and is manifested in many cross-breedings of nature and culture – two concepts that have come to be interchangeable in the twentieth century – in the form of hidden fusions, not easily decipherable. Moreover, a discussion of Gelabert’s later works disallows even a methodical distinction between content and form, between meaning and matter. This non-separation, this hermetic cohesiveness of the two components essential for the very definition of the work of art, is at the very heart of the current show. It is the nature of the materials, as well as their expressive qualities, that lead the viewer to the interpretation. The dialectic interrelations between the object and the materials from which it is made, or between the material and the objects that can be made from it – are, in this case, both the tactics as well as the poetic meaning of the work.

A forest of felled, bare, rootless tree trunks was cut down and transferred from its natural place, replaced by a thermoplastic substitute cast in its form and situated on the bare concrete of the gallery floor. Like silent witnesses, fifty mutations of dense tree trunks, each 14 inches high, report the potential horror and distruction concealed in technology. It is an “artificial” nature, a synthetic, duplicated forest.

Thermoplastic has a natural hue, similar to skin color, a fact which elicits the frightful feeling of a collection of human, organic body parts. It seems as though in the casting process, these trunks have undergone a kind of facelift, a cosmetic treatment, that transformed them into doubles that look like prostheses, like identical joints of artificial limbs. Paradoxically, it is precisely the resemblance to skin color that renders the tree trunks more akin to a human organic body part. Gelabert employs here a surrealist strategy enabling him to produce hybridization of an animate and an inanimate object, thus evoking a sense of absurdity, remoteness and uncanniness a la David Lynch. It is a “fictitious nature”, a new species of organicity permanently embalmed. We are no longer concerned here with a redeeming romantic nature, nor with a hostile wild nature. Like Lynch’s nature images (the grove and the saw mill in Twin Peaks, the artificial flower fence inBlue Velvet), nature here, too, serves as a metaphor for the destructive symbiosis between human contact and nature, a metaphor for all synthetic substitutes and reality simulations. The tree, source of wood, is the protagonist, or, in this case, the victim in the battle between culture and nature. As such, it appears in three additional works: nine remnants of burnt tree trunks in varying heights populate a rusty steel shelving unit, three on each shelf.

Once again, the artist’s height dictated the height of the rack of shelves. Here too, remnants are showcased as burnt logs, as incriminating exhibits attesting to a disaster that took place. In another work, among the most powerful in the show, in my opinion, a real, crude tree trunk appears to be breaking through the wall, emitting an unidentified fluid. A vertical section lays bare the interior of the trunk, from which a congealed, transparent substance (thermoplastic) seems to pour out; embedded in the thermoplastic is an ax, hand-carved from wood, which the tree seems to have thrown up in disgust. In another, more minimalist-abstract work, Gelabert made traditional use of the tree as raw material, processing therefrom, through meticulous craftsmanship, a clean and smoothed, polished equilateral triangle made from a grid of wooden profiles, again in a human torso scale.

In the dialectics between materials and the narrative/symbolic meaning they bear, different eras are also confronted. The tree as a “real” thing, striking roots in a solid, rural, agricultural soil, like cotton, clay, soil and coal (materials used by Gelabert in previous works) – all these belong to the distant past, to lost “realms” of nature. Opposed to these, new man-made materials – steel, barbed wire, plastic, rubber and polymers – possess a technological glow attributed to the present or the future. “Nature” materials are also associated with a ritualistic approach. In ancient cultures, the tree is perceived as a living organism, one of whose attributes is the ability to resemble a human being. Trees can bleed, be wounded, weep and die, but can also regenerate. Thus, the cutting down of a tree with a knife or an ax is a metaphor for suffering in general.

Unlike the light, ironic, Claes Oldenburgian (soft sculptures) interplay of materials – a called for comparison in this context – a melancholic asceticism, seriousness and gravity are apparent in Gelabert’s work. There is no manipulation of the popular image. Everything in his work is channeled toward the singular ritual of the object as bearing some symbolic meaning, usually one which is linked in our consciousness to masculinity and survival. Only that Florencio Gelabert is a magician of oppositions, and he often goes against the expected stereotypical dichotomies, managing to undermine and disrupt semantic orders and provoke conflicts between obvious meanings. Through parallels, juxtapositions, confrontations and transformations, the contemporary appears as ancient, the crude as elegant, the strong as vulnerable, the violent as delicate. For example, one of the pieces in the show features a wooden frame inlaid with artificial grass (astro-turf). Again, an artificial material imitating nature serves as a component of a natural wooden frame. Or, in another work, a flat steel box (4 feet long) serves as a background for the blade of a saw carved from wood and coated with a layer of thermoplastic – undoubtedly, a useless object, an oxymoron. In this act of disruption, Gelabert disarms the object, offering it another kind of existence, in the spirit of the biblical verse: “They will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks” (Isaiah 2:4). A similar reversal is also found in another piece, where, with watercolors, he painted a row of frames directly on the wall. Each frame enclosing several thermoplastic casts of a garden tools painted a rusty-red color that gives them a metal patina and the feel of “over-use” – scissors, knife, hammers, trowls, axes – are displayed as magical remnants from the toolbox of an amateur gardener.

Florencio Gelabert was born in Havana, Cuba in 1961, and arrived in Miami with the first artists of the 1990 immigration wave. He belongs to the 1980’s generation – the artists who grew into Castro’s revolution. He acquired his formal artistic education at the Instituto Superior de Artes (ISA) and at the prestigious San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts, both in Havana. The strategy which Gelabert developed in the past few years relies on a distinct modernist education, yet it is an almost impossible fusion of two antithetical methodologies: on one hand, expressivity whose origins lie in arte povera, and which is essentially a spiritual expression of the self through poor materials and junkyard objects and on the other hand, a cold and alienated minimalist aesthetic concealing a high dosage of self-referentiality. Gelabert feels at home with both these orthodox methodologies. Like an acrobat on a tight rope keeping a delicate balance, he takes from here and from there, while making sure he takes only what’s right for him. In this sense, he operates within a quintessentially post-modern field. The use of inferior, cheap and humble materials (waste materials) serves his ecological message, just as minimalism serves him for lyrical purposes. He is not interested in the linguistic objectivity embedded in classical minimalism, nor in the emotional superfluity of expressionism. Such an original combination allowed Gelabert to open a new channel of “expressive minimalism” – a channel of expression charged with poetic values, which seem to have been condensed into a capsule concealing the entire possible range of symbolic and metaphoric potential embodied in materials.

Translation: Daria Kassovsky