Gaby Cepeda on Donna Huanca
Berlin-based Bolivian-American artist Donna Huanca, by a dimly lit indigo tunnel. It led to a wall illuminated by the projected hues of DOS, PIEDRA QUEMADA (CLAY), PARRAJO (Two, Burnt Stone [Clay], Vine), 2021, a silent video of transferring colours painted on the pores and skin of what appeared like a human stomach crunching, stretching. At one level, mischievous squirts of copper paint come on the earth-and-sky colours on the stomach: blue, inexperienced, yellow, bits of white clouds and black birds. Promptly, a hand seems to smear the metallic paint, its sheen taking on every part, penetrating pores and skin folds, oozing below cloth, spreading in every single place.
The impact is soothing, even horny, which made it laborious to maneuver on from this comforting blue cavern. Fortunately, the present supplied immaterial enticements, its scent (minty, woodsy palo santo) and sounds (the soothing crackling of embers) serving to the viewer transition into an area that was fully totally different: vibrant white, lofty, reflective. Huanca’s huge, luxuriant work alluded to the fixed human–display screen interactions that construction our lives. Coupled with the massive mirrored partitions in every single place, in addition they emphasised the ubiquity of those surfaces: how speculative structure in the present day loves its shiny chrome, glass, and marble; how high-end fridges, doorbells, and alarm clocks are additionally screens now.
Huanca’s course of is as follows: She paints on our bodies, carefully pictures them, blows the photographs up on canvas, after which provides thick layers of oil paint mushed with sand. The work within the second room, ESPINA AZUL (Blue Thorn) and VERDE PUSSAX (Inexperienced Pussax), each 2021,have been predominantly kelly and mint inexperienced, sky and deep blue, with whirlpools of white. With time, recognizably human options started to peek out from the swirls of crusty, shiny paint: a hand, a ponytail, a chin. The third gallery contained BLISS STARTE/GOLDEN HOUR, 2021, a hanging concoction of Pepto-Bismol pink with greens, blues, and whites below which the textures of dry, cracked clay and coarse pores and skin could possibly be deciphered. Right here, too, was one other spotlight, the sculpture MŪ_LĀ__DHĀ_RA PROTECTOR REDUX, 2022, an enormous stainless-steel disk carved in a symmetrical Rorschach-like type and adorned on one facet with locks and chrome butt plugs and on the opposite with an extended, lacelike curtain of blond and pink hair extensions. From its crown, in an assertive bisection, hung an imposing crimson ponytail of artificial hair divided into little buns. This object demanded recognition; in one other time and place it may have been an object of worship. A equally imposing statue was CASITA QUINCUNX (Quincunx Home), 2022, a vaguely spiritual determine shaped out of a pile of metal wire and comfortable PVC cloth. The colours have been Huanca’s go-to blues, greens, and orange with delicate touches of black. The plastic appeared as if it had melted to embrace the metal’s silhouette whereas concurrently holding its insides in place: a shirt, a flower, a belt, extra hair extensions. It felt like a humanoid model of Tracey Emin’s My Mattress, 1998.
Huanca’s observe is ostensibly about decolonization and historical past, however it struck me that it’s really primarily about pores and skin; her major energy is surfaces. Huanca is a grasp of textures and of the doable combos of clay, cloth, paint, plastic, steel, mirrors. The digital and the corporeal are all very happy to social gathering collectively. Her penchant for mural-size work of ocean blue delightfully swirling with white, her ability for matching that already successful combo with different equally engaging colours: That’s what let the artist’s attractive creations land on the pores and skin of lusted-after Louis Vuitton luggage final fall. Huanca’s works are stunning, even ravishingly seductive, whether or not they’re emancipatory or anticolonial—properly, that looks like a superficial query to ask of them.
— Gaby Cepeda
