Consuelo Cavaniglia

Melissa Keys

Consuelo Caviniglia’s title is a quotation from a text titled ‘Of Other Spaces’ by Michel Foucault, the author writes, ‘I come back toward myself: I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I was’. See ‘Of other spaces’ published by the French journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité in October 1984.

Elieen’s Gray’s house E-1027 was named after its creator and her partner at the time architect Jean Badovici, who was the owner of the property. The ‘E’ stands for Eileen, ’10’ represents the letter J for Jean, the ‘2’ is B for Badovici and ‘7’ signifies G for Gray. Arrayed along the museum wall, Consuelo Cavaniglia’s enigmatic installation I come back toward myself I, II and III 2019 leads the viewer’s eye through a sequence of openings—apertures cut out of assembled planes of green and grey tinted glass set into a framework of articulated metal supports. The glass panels partially capture and hold reflections, offering fugitive glimpses of ourselves within the work and encouraging us to move, look and look again.

When observed from the side, the holes in each structure appear to align, together creating a vertiginous tunnel-like visual effect. This construction appears to be purposeful, like some kind of scientific, medical, or photographic apparatus designed to perform an optical or perceptual function. Encountering the installation one is invited to gaze through and beyond the framing forms and opaque media, triggering imagination and experimentation by exploring the possibilities of the interplay of structure, materials and surfaces in space.

Influenced by the modernist glass and chromiumplated steel furniture and folding screens of the Irish-born architect, Eileen Gray, one of the most innovative designers of the early twentieth century, Cavaniglia’s sculpture both frames and transcends its environment, initiating a dynamic tension between abstract phenomenological and everyday sensory experience. The modular hinged forms imply a sense of animation, of things unfixed, or, subject to change, and allude to Gray’s iconic modernist house design, E-1027,1 completed in 1929 on the Côte d’Azur in the south of France, which features a series of sliding, concertina windows that allow light to flood through the house throughout the different phases of the day. Gray’s designs largely comprise circular and rectangular structures which are echoed in Cavaniglia’s vocabulary of forms and arrangements, while her spherical apertures evoke the shape of the sun and the passage of light and time. The artist’s ongoing use of industrial materials and reductive systems of basic forms reminds us of the serial nature and cool materiality of minimalism, however, unlike her antecedents of the sixties Cavaniglia nudges our thoughts past the physical in search of new dimensions, places and spaces beyond the here and now. Her practice is suggestive of both the bodily mechanisms of perception and the capricious lens of vision—from inner consciousness to the ever-watchful eye of surveillance, the menacing infrastructure of machines that record and monitor our every movement. I come back toward myself is both stimulating and disorientating, drawing our critical imagination through a multitude of ideas, material propositions and moments in time. The poetic title of the installation speaks of things external turning inward, and while ultimately ambiguous, and elusive, alludes to both the phenomenological and the metaphysical nature of sight and experience.2 Cavaniglia’s clean smooth surfaces and geometric forms draw upon the rational visual language and aspirations of modernist architecture and design, and are simultaneously open to the uncertainty of psychological dynamics. Charged with narrative promise, the work invites interaction that leads everywhere and nowhere, taking the viewer through a series of materials, structures and shapes that ask us to investigate the way that we see and apprehend our surrounds.