Mercedes Teixido: The Nothing and the Everything
Contemporary Art, through
Each of Mercedes Teixido’s tiny sculptural installations is its own little world, as if an actual event were depicted within the bell jar that protects each one. A mound of hair is arranged a bit like a haystack, for example, and poised above it is a tiny magnifying glass too far away to be seen through. The multiple lines of the hair give the scene some of the precise detail of a Dürer etching or a page from an illuminated manuscript. But the meaning is obscure. If the mound is a haystack, Teixido may be referring to the saying about searching for a needle; in that case the useless magnifying glass, dwarfed by the mound, suggests futility. But in any case these objects somehow evoke emotions, even hint at drama.
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Teixido, 35, is a Californian whose parents emigrated in the mid-50s from Paraguay to Delaware, where she was born; her physician father was a political exile from the Stroessner regime. She recalls the isolation of growing up in a Paraguayan family in Wilmington: “There wasn’t a minority group to look to.” Teixido acknowledges a variety of influences, from her Catholic upbringing to the writings of Meher Baba (one of whose books provides the show’s title). Her work has been described in terms of magic realism, and she acknowledges reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
What makes Teixido’s work so effective is its vividness. The exhibit installation helps: the focused lighting, the almost lenslike bell jars, and the large empty spaces have the effect of concentrating energy and attention on these five small works, the only objects in the room. It’s as if some tiny citizen of these sealed-off landscapes really did comb the hair or might be looking for a needle. Ultimately Teixido’s images may be sensed as “metaphors for various struggles,” as she writes, but before that they seem frozen moments in miniature dramas. The blade of a minuscule shovel mounted above a mound of tiny pebbles (actually aquarium gravel) is smaller than most of the stones: it seems the shovel could barely lift them, and it’s hard to see where it would put them if it could since the gravel fills the sealed space. Nonetheless the shovel, its blade pointed downward, suggests that the implied Sisyphean rearranging is something that must, and will, continue.
LeBourgeois’ paintings combine the fine detail of Renaissance art with the emotionalized indistinctness common to the romantic period. Sometimes she draws every branch of a tree, but some of her fields, roads, and eggs are relatively featureless. This approach universalizes her landscapes while giving them a nostalgic air: this is not a particular road, it’s the idea of a road. Noting that she rarely paints and draws directly from nature, that she uses sketches, photographs, and memories instead, LeBourgeois says there’s “a certain remove from the landscape” in her work. “It’s more about the imagination of the landscape than the landscape itself,” she told me.
