Pragmatic Motivation, Decadent Design

Masterpieces of French Art Deco

Metropolitan Museum of Art
No set closing date

‘Masterpieces of French Art Deco’, a jewel of an installation within the Metropolitan Museum’s ‘Masterpieces of Modern Design’ galleries, presents objects that typify the slick and shiny aesthetic developed by French designers between the World Wars: Art Deco.

French Art Deco is considered one of the strongest areas of the Metropolitan’s modern design collection. Visually arresting and technically innovative examples fill this small installation. Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann’s furniture ensembles encompass beautiful forms and superb detailing with ‘new’ exotic woods. Jean Dunand’s lacquer pieces have a luminous otherworldly depth balanced with geometric forms. (Both Ruhlmann’s and Dunand’s pieces demonstrate how ‘exoticism’ in the decorative arts dynamically incorporated materials and techniques from African and Asian cultures without the imperialist overtones of visual art’s more overt referencing.)

Jean Dunand, Portrait of Juliette de Saint Cyr, c. 1925, Lacquered wood, eggshell
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

‘Masterpieces of French Art Deco’ identifies the high renaissance of the Art Deco era as bookended by two government sponsored ‘expositions’. It emerged from a pragmatic desire by designers to create something with more commercial appeal than its relatively unprofitable predecessor, Art Nouveau. In 1925, looking to stimulate the design industry after the devastation of World War I, the French government sponsored the ‘Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes’. The term Art Deco was coined by shortening the words ‘Arts Décoratifs’, and the exhibition defined a new style of art characterized by streamlined classicism and dignified simple forms.

For over a decade, Art Deco became a worldwide style, affecting decorative arts and architecture, as well as painting, graphic arts, fashion and film. However by the late 1930’s Art Deco fell out of vogue as the devastating effects of the Great Depression cast the style’s sleek aesthetic as gaudy and irrelevant. In an attempt to re-energize France’s importance in the modern world, the French government hosted the ‘Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne’. This exhibition inadvertently marked the end of the Art Deco era, as science and technology were promoted as the key to France’s future success.

Extended wall text throughout the gallery emphasizes this commercial and pragmatic history of Art Deco. One of the delights then, of viewing ‘Masterpieces of French Art Deco’, is discovering how luxurious and opulent the realization of these very practical goals was. Art Deco was about luxury trade.

Today the principles of simple stylish form tend to by synonymous with utilitarian and affordable objects (hello Ikea!). However, during the height of the Art Deco period ‘simple and stylish’ was resting your daily upon Clément Rousseau’s Newspaper Table (1924), exquisitely crafted from ebony, ivory and sharkskin.

Clément Rousseau, Newspaper Table, 1924, Ebony, sharkskin, ivory

Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The grandest amalgamation of luxury and trade in the show is represented by Jean Dupas’ The History of Navigation (1934). This monumental reverse-painted and gilded glass mural was created for the first-class salon of the ocean-liner SS Normandie, the largest and fastest ship in the world during the 1930s. In World War II, the United States seized the SS Normandie in New York to convert her into a troopship and during this process the liner caught fire, capsized and sank. Fortunately this happened after the 20 feet high, 56 panel Dupas mural had been recovered. Although, the spirit of Art Deco decadence symbolically sank with the SS Normandie to the bottom of the Hudson River.

‘Masterpieces of French Art Deco’ is not technically a Special Exhibition because it features only works from the Metropolitan’s collection. However its focused subject, extensive contextualizing labels and stylish design make it feel like exhibition worthy of eulogizing. I do not know when ‘Masterpieces of French Art Deco’ appeared, and I do not know when its pieces are slated to rotate back into storage, however it is there now and it is highly worth seeing.

A Small Step from Reality

Claes Oldenburg: Early Sculpture, Drawings and Happenings Films
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen: The Music Room

Whitney Museum of American Art
Until September 6, 2009

The first artwork a viewer meets, when stepping out of the elevator on level two at the Whitney Museum, is French Fries and Ketchup (1963). This over-sized stuffed vinyl sculpture is composed of elongated tan rectangles; ‘fries’, draped with an amorphous red pillow; ‘ketchup’. Other works accompanying French Fries and Ketchup on the gallery floor are a fishpond-sized ashtray filled with giant cigarette butts, a giant B.L.T and an upholstered toilet. It is obviously a Claes Oldenburg exhibition.

French Fries and Ketchup works like all Oldenburg's early sculptures; it is a blunt interpretation of an object, devoid of the characteristics that might convey the original's essence. The strips of ‘potato’ are not golden, their edges are not crisp, they do not steam, they do not make your mouth water. In other words, Claes Oldenburg removes the ‘yum’ from french fries and ketchup. Yet the strange thing is that Oldenburg’s works are incredibly satisfying to look at precisely because they so obviously reference the everyday. The charm of Oldenburg is his accessibility. The question of Oldenburg is: why are these soulless objects so appealing?

French Fries and Ketchup, 1963

In 1961 Oldenburg rented a store at 107 E. Second Street in the East Village. He then ran this store as an art piece known as ‘The Store’ in which he sold sculptures based on goods you would normally buy in a store. An eclectic selection of these sculptures (bra, pie, toast, potato chips), made from draping plaster-dipped muslin over chicken wire, is on display at the Whitney. They are crude creations with rough surfaces, weak edges and patchy paintwork, yet they still instantly invoke a personal response as the viewer can identify a ‘small treat’ consumer good. Interestingly, Black Girdle (1961), with its obsolete subject, is almost devoid of its referential quality in the 21st Century and therefore now barely recognizable in this basic plaster form.

Shirt, 1961 and Black Girdle, 1961

Drawings that relate to Oldenburg’s works are hung throughout the exhibition. He is an accomplished drawer. His images have the dull edges of his sculpture yet they still precisely deliver the intended effect. Study for Soft Fireplug (1969) personifies an upside-down fireplug; the ‘plug’ is shown to slump with a soft weight, its ‘legs’ are splayed, its ‘head’ tilts forward. Amazingly, with simple pencil, Oldenburg conveys a material – soft, heavy, metal – that does not exist.

Study for Soft Fireplug, Inverted, 1968

Oldenburg’s drawings are not only formal studies for sculptures he has created, but also fantasies that explore the space between possible and impossible, planned and unplanned, known and unknown. In this sense these drawings are similar to the scripts he wrote, which someone else shot, for Happenings films produced in the 1960s (seven of these films are on view at the Whitney). The drawings and scripts both loosely chart what may happen when Oldenburg’s ideas are realized as form/moving-image, however the point is they cannot begin to express the lived experience of viewing Oldenburg’s more completed works.

A large component of the Whitney exhibition is dedicated to Oldenburg’s collaborations with Coosje van Bruggen. The gallery entitled The Music Room features instrument sculptures Oldenburg and van Bruggen created between 1992 and 2006 (van Bruggen died early 2009). These later sculptures are more detailed and closer to true scale than Oldenburg’s iconic vinyl works. Made from porous muslin and featuring frayed edges, these works seem to breathe as their forms literally unraveled off the wall.

Soft French Horn, 2002

In Soft Saxophone, Scale A, Muslin (1992) Oldenburg and van Bruggen place the stuffed muslin body of a saxophone upon a ‘bed’ made from a painted grey rectangular piece of canvas that has been removed from its stretcher. Like the canvas, the saxophone is also without a ‘skeleton’; as a result its buttons, levers and rods have slipped off its soft body. Or perhaps these buttons, levers and rods are waiting to be attached to the body? The muslin material and rough seams gives the work the feel of a dressmaker’s mock-up, waiting approval for the final copy.

Study for Store Poster, 1961, Store Poster, 1961

With many of Oldenburg’s sculptures it is impossible to decide if they are on the verge of assemblage or deconstruction. Are they studies for, or interpretations derived from, the objects they reference? I think the answer is both. Oldenburg’s sculptures are surprising in scale and material, but they also are comforting as typical household objects we bring into our realm of experience. (On the other hand, Oldenburg’s Happenings films are obscure and, because they push away from reality, ultimately tedious.) A shirt, a sandwich, a saxophone; all made great, not because they are transformed into iconic artworks, but because they slightly skew our understanding of these common objects. It is a small step Oldenburg and van Bruggen ask us to take in considering new meanings for these objects, but an important one all the same.

Passionate Self-Control

Francis Bacon: A Century Retrospective

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Until August 16, 2009

‘A Century Retrospective’ celebrates one hundred years of Francis Bacon. This symbolic event – the birthday of a dead man – is marked by a greatest hits exhibition, bringing together the most significant works from the most significant periods of Bacon’s career.

Marking this dead artist’s century birthday with an unapologetic ‘walk down museum lane’ does not necessarily shed new critical light on Bacon’s career. However, it does give audiences a fantastic opportunity to understand the essentials of Bacon’s oeuvre; adding light and shadow to the postwar existential philosophy that might otherwise be simply summed-up by Bacon’s iconic portrait of Innocent X. Study after Velazquez (1950), from Bacon’s most famous series, personifies ideas of mental frustration dissolving into futile rage. This commanding image epitomizes the theme of meaninglessness in an absurd world running through the exhibition: a powerful Pope screams at his mortality as he dissolves into the canvas. Yet the beauty of ‘A Century Retrospective’ is in learning how many types of meaninglessness there really are.

Study after Velázquez, 1950

Bacon thrived on the oxymoron: sensuous brutality, frail power, authoritative insecurity. He was fascinated with combining these dueling characteristics and revealing their presence in the known world. Bacon avoided painting from life, and instead drew inspiration from secondary sources; photographs of his friends, images from art history texts, Muybridge’s time-lapse photograph series Human Figure in Motion. What is remarkable is the sense of fantasy and emotional clout produced from these pre-packaged images.

In Study of a Figure in Landscape (1952) Bacon depicts a naked man, crouched in long yellow grass. The man is a heavy painterly presence within the wispy strokes of grass; he watches the viewer watching the man. A sort-of reverse safari scenario occurs as ferocious plains animals are substituted with the humans who hunt them. In this case, both man and viewer are the predators, their menace turned against each other.

Study of a Figure in Landscape, 1952

Bacon tunes the predatory aggression of Study of a Figure in Landscape into sinister refinement in Man in Blue V (1954). The scene is a modern bar where a man with distorted face and neat suit, leans suggestively towards the viewer. If this ‘lean’ seems sexually menacing, then the viewer must own the innuendo of his/her gaze. Again, Bacon cannily maneuvers his audience into a primal experience, where sexual drives can be as senseless and impulsive as the violence of a safari hunt.

Man in Blue V, 1954

Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962

The most overtly violent painting in the exhibition is Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962). This garish triptych shows the route from man to meat in three sadistic steps, viewed through a fish-eye lens spotlighting the action of each scene. The first canvas depicts two men with solid forms and craggy faces, staring blankly at slabs of meat on front of them. In the second canvas a man’s body violently disintegrates. He lies on a bare hospital-style bed, his flesh exploding. The mattress and sheets are stained red - one of the few instances of Bacon actually depicting blood. The third canvas presents an amorphic piece of flesh, hung up as butcher’s meat, the flesh identifiable by ribs, vertebrae and small parasitic teeth. A dog peers up at it in the foreground. Bacon’s blunt illustration of the short steps from consciousness to flesh echo Muybridge’s time-lapse photographs, breaking down movement to essentials. Three Studies for a Crucifixion is an exhaustive painting, graphicly posing psychological pretensions and dead flesh as interchangeable states.

Bacon’s later work is more introspective and emotionally enigmatic, compared with his earlier preoccupation with humanity’s shortcomings and outright failings. Portrait of John Edwards (1988) offers a surprisingly serene and recognizable portrait. Throughout his career Bacon commissioned photographer John Deakin to create series of portraits of his friends, from which Bacon would paint. These photographs, on display in ‘A Century Retrospective’, are studio-stained with paint, drawn-on, crumpled, cut and torn. Bacon seems to have treated them carelessly as objects, yet used them intensely. The late paintings that derive from these images are surprisingly more solid and intimate than his earlier works. In Portrait of John Edwards the figure’s flesh is neatly contained within a single form. The armless torso and toeless feet are minor distortions compared with the realism of Edward’s face, chest and legs. The Bacon ‘twist’ occurs on the figure’s left foot, pink flesh subtly melting into pink shadow. Bacon seems to be stating: it may not be obvious, but we are all slowly disappearing.

Portrait of John Edwards, 1988

‘A Century Retrospective’ is an excellent summary of Bacon’s evolving style and subject matter. His paintings move between extreme fragility, where paint seems to fight not to disappear into the canvas, to bold expression of color in dirty, gaudy layers. The resulting technique embodies the tension and contradictory passion of Bacon’s hand. ‘A Century Retrospective’ also reveals Bacon’s shifting subject matter, as he swings between gruesome twisted flesh to the joy and pain of intimate friendships. These blunt and gentle expressions ensure that a survey of Bacon’s art becomes an oxymoron in itself. It is an overview of passionate self-control and messy precision. There is no real meaning behind the celebration of a dead artist’s hypothetical 100th birthday. However, I think the significance placed on this meaninglessness would have appealed to Bacon.

Picasso v. Scholder

“I’m sure I’m prejudiced, but fine art is still the best racket around.”
- Fritz Scholder

“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”
- Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso: Mosqueteros
Gagosian, New York
March 26 - June 6, 2009

Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian
National Museum of the American Indian, New York
November 1, 2008 - May 17, 2009

Has an artist, at the end of a successful career, become the master of his oeuvre? Or is any sense of ‘mastery’ as odds with the perpetual challenge that is an artist’s essential job?

Two different solo exhibitions of late-career paintings currently on view in New York offer differing perspectives on these questions. “Pablo Picasso: Mosqueteros”, at Gagosian, showcases a master of paint luxuriating in the style and subjects he spent a lifetime exploring. “Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian”, at the NMAI New York, reveals an artist who late in his career decided to reject the source of his fame and seek new paths for expression.

“Mosqueteros” brings together Picasso’s paintings and prints from 1963 to 1973. These late-career works showcase the artist working at his most animated. His style is raw yet fluid, as he depicts the familiar a mix of matadors, female nudes, and embracing couples. However, while these subjects seem proverbial Picasso, their realization as compositions reveals a pulsing new energy, as the paint is applied with a messy confidence not present in his earlier oeuvre.

Head of a Matador (1970), shows a swollen-headed matador, his twisting shoulders embodying characteristic Picasso dual frontal and side viewpoints. The application of paint is so thick on the matador’s face that it creates a low-relief structure at the centre of the canvas. This contrasts with the wash of yellow background, absent in places to dramatically reveal exposed white canvas, like a halo, behind the matador. Picasso is painting with loose vigor, but he is also painting intelligently; the thick paint to create form, the sparse paint to create a void. Viewed in context of Picasso’s revolutionary development of Cubism nearly 65 years earlier, which destroyed the pictorial illusion of reality with multiple viewpoints, Head of a Matador can be read as simultaneously to coalesce and corrupt Picasso’s own vision for art. The form of the matador encompasses a new literal solidity on the canvas, while the figure of the matador embodies a quintessential Cubist distortion.

“Mosqueteros” is Picasso, and it is also a new Picasso. On the other hand, the late-career works of Fritz Scholder, on display in “Indian/Not Indian”, suggest an artist who sought the challenge of pushing his practice into new realms as a form of cathartic overhaul of self, rather than an affirmation.

In 1982 Fritz Scholder, one of the most highly regarded painters of Native Americans, praised for his social realism and pop-art aesthetic, announced he was quitting the subject of the American Indian. He later reflected, “I had made my statement on the Indian as a subject, and was ready to move in a more universal and mystical arena.” The results are a mixed bag of mythical beings, the afterlife, and the miscellaneous.

Scholder’s style, like Picasso’s, offers contrasts between painterly textures and weak scratchy infill. However, unlike Picasso, Scholder allows his paint to dry between each color layer, building up a sense of luminosity and depth in his works. Scholder’s colors remain more pure and translucent, while Picasso’s are a happy jumble of tones.

In Scholder’s trilogy, Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory (1996), he personifies the spirit realm with three grand portraits. Heaven and Hell are shown as faceless heads in typically white and red color palettes respectively. Purgatory is the surprise, with a toothy gaping mouth, the figure seems to simultaneously recede into, and emerge out of, the canvas. Scholder creates sections of flat matte black, perhaps an analogy for the empty space of purgatory, then contrasts them with textured areas of paint and collage that imply a worldly presence.

Purgatory shows the horrors of spiritual uncertainty. This sense of being attracted to exploring something awful yet unknown is also at the heart of Scholder’s depictions of vampires, hooded men and distorted figures. The final painting in the exhibition, Self-Portrait with Grey Cat (2003), puts these mystical creatures into the context of Scholder’s own doubts about mortality and the afterlife. Considering these dark artworks within the oeuvre of Scholder’s paintings of Native Americans, “Indian/Not Indian” reminds the viewer that Scholder’s paintings were never as fluffy as his ‘pop’ aesthetic suggested.

“Indian/Not Indian” and “Mosqueteros” are both intense autobiographical shows. As Picasso and Scholder’s works are testaments to their skill as painting men, they are also reflections of their states-of-mind at the end of their careers. Picasso is confident, but always pushing himself to be a better version of Picasso. On the other hand, Scholder allows himself self-doubt, and exploits this in paintings that find new subjects to reconsider old themes. The ‘mastery’ these two exhibitions demonstrate is that while being true to the spectrum of their careers, neither artist allowed the sense of challenge to slip from their practice.

Picasso, Buste, 1972

Picasso, Head of Matador, 1970

Scholder, Purgatory, 1996

Scholder, Self-Portrait with Grey Cat, 2003

Please come in and relax, but don’t walk those dirty sneakers all over my carpet!

Pipilotti Rist, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
November 19, 2008–February 2, 2009

It is redundant to state that contemporary can offend. However, it is necessary to acknowledge, at a point, if art focuses too single-mindedly on attacking viewers’ perceptions, assumptions or complacencies, then a response of alienation rather than enlightenment is sure to occur. The Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist responds to this sense of ‘viewer assault’ with her installation Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) (2009), currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This mammoth installation, filling all 7354 cubic meters of the museum’s atrium, uses video projections of natural environments, soft furnishings and an organic soundtrack to encourage visitors to simply relax.

Rist’s video dominates the gallery. Images of flora and fauna are projected onto the three four-story high walls of the atrium. The colors are seductively saturated. Tulips, apples, worms, water, a naked girl, a hairy hog: all pan across the walls, writhing slowly. The giant scale of the images, and the ground-level perspective, casts the viewer as an ant in this bizarre natural world, and with a bug-like understanding we have no awareness of a larger narrative. Our world is reduced to a series of sequences – a hog eats an apple, a girl pushes a flower petal up her nose – unfolding to the sound of insect-like humming and droning.

The theme of slightly grotesque beauty flows through to Rist’s decorating choices. The floor is covered with plush puce carpet, upon which sits an even plusher white rug. The upper-gallery balconies are covered with fuchsia curtains. While in the middle of the gallery sits a large circular teal lounge.

Pipilotti Rist, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), installation view (curator Klaus Biesenbach explains all here)

A wall text reads, “Please feel as liberated as possible and move as freely as you can or want to!” Rist’s embracing philosophy attempts to make intimate and accessible a space that might otherwise be considered unsympathetic and elitist. Judging from the crowd of viewers filling the atrium on the cold Wednesday morning when I visited, Rist has been successful. Every space on the white rug was filled with bodies; couples snuggled on the lounge, babies crawled about on floor, and singles sprawled anywhere they could.

Rist has given MoMA’s atrium an extreme makeover, and she plays the gracious host inviting guests to come and experience the new renovations. Although like a house-proud, yet faintly uptight host, Rist requests visitors, “Please remove your shoes before stepping onto the while carpet or sitting on the sofa and please make new friends at the museum.”

The incongruous request to ‘remove your shoes’ and ‘make friends’ at the same time hints that Pour Your Body Out is not quite the love-in it originally seemed. Does taking our shoes off makes us feel so liberated we can talk to strangers? Do we really trust the lady who matches puce carpet with box-pleated fuchsia curtains?

Rist’s transformation of MoMA’s atrium is remarkable. Her video projections are beautiful yet sinister, and her furnishings transform a through-space to a destination. However, Rist’s suggestions for how one can respond to Pour Your Body Out are slightly irritating. While her enthusiasm is admirable – “Rolling around and singing is also allowed!” – her instructions are invasive. Unsophisticated ideas of ‘rolling around and singing’ do not coalesce with the languid atmosphere Rist has created. This in evidenced by the swarm of visitors lounging upon the central couch. Like bees to honey, it is an instinct to be intrigued by Pour Your Body Out, not a directive.

Brave New World? Maybe, maybe not...

‘After Nature’ at The New Museum of Contemporary Art
July 17 – September 21, 2008

Werner Hertzog’s film Lessons of Darkness uses dramatic footage taken from a helicopter sweeping over thick black smoke of the 1991 Kuwait oil well fires. This is interspersed with stark testimonials by individuals who survived the traumas of the Gulf War on the ground. A heroic soundtrack, text-cards of bible quotes and Hertzog’s moralizing voiceover ensures Lessons of Darkness is a vision of a post-apocalyptic nightmare.

The exhibition ‘After Nature’ takes Hertzog’s film as a starting point for bringing together artworks that consider contemporary ideas about a future beyond mankind. Drawing on contemporary, futuristic and everything-in-between imagery, the art on display is a real mixed-bag; a sweeping emotional spectrum of hope, cynicism and apathy. However, in a climate of global-warming and environmental degradation, political and social commentary is pointedly kept to a minimum.

Zoë Leonard’s Tree (1997), fused together from metal and wood, acts as an eerie reminder of a cyborg technology that already exists; on urban footpaths trees are choked by the concrete they emerge from, only to be kept upright by metal beams and wires.

Zoe Leonard, Tree, 1997. Wood, steal and steal cables

Paweł Althamer’s life-size figures made from grass and animal intestines seem like crude set pieces for an end-of-the-world production. The artist depicts himself in Pawał and Monica (2002) with a female partner. The rough semi-translucent complexion of the couple composed with intestine skin contrasts with the video camera and cell phone they hold. Reminiscent of Duane Hanson’s hyper-real sculptures of tourists, Althamer’s Pawał and Monica become tourists of their own demise.

Leonard and Althamer’s works share a sinister and fatalistic perspective on civilization’s progress towards an end, however the older works in this multigenerational exhibition look to the future with a sincere sense of wonder at the wonderful.

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s luminous paintings of celestial cities from the 1950s, while depicting atomic explosions, use the apocalyptic subject to express a sense of awe at the infinite beauty they will create.

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Atomic Age, 1955

August Strindberg’s naïve attempts to create a photogram of the universe in the late 19th century (by simply exposing photographic plates to the night sky) result in images that looks remarkably like a galaxy. It is as if Strindberg’s hopeful vision alone drove the success of his project.

August Strindberg, Celestograph, 1894

When the political seeps into the exhibition it is strangely diminished, absurd even, within the grand vision of an uncertain, yet inevitable, future for the world.

Robert Kusmirowski’s life-size recreation of the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s cabin (looking like a pre-exploded Cornelia Parker installation) seems out of place by its specific thematic tethering to recent events. Connecting the dots between acts of terrorism in the late 20th century and the end of mankind seems… like a lot of messy philosophical and political dots.

Robert Kusmirowski's reproduction of Theodore Kaczynski's cabin

Erik van Lieshout’s video Hope (2008) tells the story of the artist and his mother traveling to Africa to, simply put, ‘save’ it. By cobbling together the most trivial and absurd footage from their trip van Lieshout attempts to express the ‘impossible absurdity of death’. The outcome is so self-conscious that, while it works as a critique of artists’ vanity, within the context of ‘Beyond Nature’ the implications of Africa's doom seem unfair in the light of van Lieshout’s deliberate indifference to his subject.

‘After Nature’ works best when the artworks take science-fiction, i.e. established ideas of what the future may be like, as a starting point for extrapolating on contemporary states of mind. It is certainly interesting to imagine a world ‘after nature’, and art is a dynamic tool for theorizing space as the next frontier. Robert Cuoghi’s delicate images of crystallized biomorphic forms could be representations of a star being born. Or perhaps a star’s death? The intentional ambiguity over whether the concept of ‘after nature’ is an ultimate end or a beautiful beginning stimulates a sense of infinite possibly… and this is no small achievement.