Formas del amor
Por Marina Oybin
There are thorny, arduous paths, the kind that many times have to be crossed. Others, like those that Marcela Cabutti opens to us in Floating Explosions, at the Brick Museum, are made of soft crystals: spheres like small, magical worlds, and zigzagging and suspended organic forms that seem to float.
They are pieces of glass that were perhaps trails of thorns and that the artist transformed: they are made with recycled materials, they passed through other hands, they integrated unknown biographies. There is a lot of utopia in those soft shapes that attract each other.
“You can imagine the sound of the air when creating them, like a kind of dance of materials, almost the same gestures of my hands with the brush and pen to draw,” says the artist, who began working with crystals about her works. more than 20 years. He completed a master’s degree in Design and Bionics at the Research Center of the European Institute of Design in Milan. In Murano, he specialized in glass pieces in the workshop of Pino Signoretto, who made the glass pieces for Jeff Koons. In 2000, at Columbus College of Art and Design (Ohio), as resident artist he made giant, hallucinated flowers and pupils in glass.
Floating Explosions emerged from the research she conducted in Exploring the Collection #2 Gyula Kosice / Marcela Cabutti (2018) in Fortabat Collection. This interest in pieces made with air, almost weightless, is the artist’s DNA. In both inflatable and glass forms the constitutive principle is similar: the air tensions the membranes. The artist says that reading The Poetics of Space and Air and Dreams, by Gaston Bachelard, deeply marked her to this day: she became interested “in the vital breath as a reflection on the phenomenology and poetics of air.” For his thesis, he visited Leonardo Da Vinci’s house and investigated his hot air balloons and flying machines.
Mud, rock, glass, inflatables, steel, wood, resin are for Cabutti a field of inquiry, a laboratory of experimentation: in his hands mere matter becomes a mysterious jewel. He is passionate about knowing, investigating, modifying and transforming. If in the exhibition Balcarce, topographic memories of a landscape (2021), at Del Infinito gallery, Cabutti immersed us in a hanging installation made with splinters of gneiss rocks, found after an explosion that caused 15 thousand tons of stone to collapse, now it generated a vital burst.
Cabutti, who exhibited in Milan, Madrid, Norway, Rome, Turin and in different cities in Argentina, creates everything from monumental works that are already a hallmark of the city (such as Pasionaria in Puerto Madero) to fragile pieces of glass. Exuberant out-of-scale flowers, an exotic fauna of anthropomorphic beings, organisms frozen in time, insects and giant hummingbirds inhabit the dazzling cosmos of Cabutti. The artist gave life to a new species of fireflies and dragonflies made with Murano glass, metals and electrical systems. He researched and created with air and light: first inflatable plastic objects; then translucent glass. With blown glass, he made fascinating Thick Drops, Infinite Landscapes, Kisses, Black Rains and Geometries of the sky. And now, pieces of an exquisite synthesis that dance, attract and, at the same time, levitate: forms of love.