Carolina Bazo: The Void that Fills

Everyday life has a rhythm to it that fills as much as it empties our days with its routine.

In fact, the relay between “empty” and “full” is what configures a rhythm; sequence of mutually co-dependent presences and absences. Highlighting that an absence has as much presence as that that we call a “presence”, Carolina Bazo puts both terms in quotation marks in her “Rutilante” exhibition, suggesting that these poles are not just interchangeable, but oscillatory. And, perhaps, simultaneously one pole and the other.

The artist’s basic unit is the conjoining of figure and background—it’s symbolic and aesthetic possibilities are explored in her images. Such individual images are threaded together in the work La colcha, which accordingly multiplies the unit’s possibilities in a tableau where non-discursive narratives interweave. But this figure/background tension does not only concern her paintings, for it runs through her works in resin, which tend towards icon-like imagery. And her icons are feminine.

That tension is emphasized by Bazo’s design patterns, which rule over certain works individually, as is the case with her “kaleidoscopes”—that series of circular works in resin, where the characters are arranged in templates of radial symmetry. But these patterns also organize large groups of works, as is the case with the 46 resin circumferences that make up the “Rutilante: revalorización del óvulo, medidas variables” series, the characters of which invite us to survey their similarities and differences as elements belonging to the set. In fact, the pattern is also transversal, given that “Rutilante” and “Caleidoscopio” repeat the same character that, in turn, extends the pattern through its details. These characters wear a “corset” (which emphasizes their curves; stereotypical sign of femininity) made up of dots that internally—and on a small scale—replicate the circularity of the format. This replication is also nominal: “Rutilante” within “Rutilante”.

In these series, the compositional structure is a pattern of visual repetition that evokes routine as a pattern of lived repetition. The reference to the ovule and its cyclical pattern of biological change for women isn’t fortuitous. Repetition and change, perceptible and imperceptible (somatic or psychic). In that sense, the resin pieces do not only explore the ambivalent correlation between figure and ground, but they equally touch upon the contours of space and time as a gendered experience.

In two dimensions, the figure-as-silhouette stresses the “feminine shape” that the monochromatic backgrounds emphasize. In three dimensions, the transparent resin backgrounds stand up as the materialization of empty space: a tangible “neutral shape” in itself. The reification of this “void” annuls it as such and, nonetheless, it somehow preserves its illusion: its “coloured transparency” allows perceiving it as the “surrounding space” of an image-silhouette and/or of an object. At the same time, actual empty-space becomes displaced, surrounding resin’s “solidified space”, underscoring the homogenizing ubiquity of space. After all, everything and everyone is “trapped” in it.

The idea of time-flows traverses the works where the artist has trapped, amber-like, various objects of quotidian use, as if they were fossils of everyday life. In the portrait series, “Equilibrio”, which bear a certain resemblance to religious icons, Bazo arranges an almost mystic relation between characters and objects. Those (mass produced) objects reveal themselves as fetishes of the everyday, which we accumulate in our homes and with which we occupy our lives, almost to the point of saturation. But this is a saturation that ornaments. The objects even appeal to vanity, where their saturated colour enables their use as “accessories”. This reiteration of objects and images links vanity and saturation: ¿is it about the artist’s own saturation, whose characters do not shy away from self-portraiture?

In these resin pieces, time has been stopped and extended: the objects seem preserved in “suspended animation”. And their accumulation—constituting a peculiar archive—implies in and of itself the passage of time. But, also, by “floating” without ever falling to the ground, they evoke a frozen instant. Such instant can be linked to a film still, as intimated by the cuts of the “triptych” El cuerpo se divide en tres partes (the body is divided in three parts), a title that brings to mind those old litanies: “head, torso, limbs” and “mind, body, soul”.

The characters with their eyes closed—asleep?—doubly float: submerged in resin and in the dream world. They remain outside everyday routines yet allude to the practical world embodied in the objects (do they dream of this world?). They’re isolated from the world yet escort societal aesthetic codes of seduction (make-up, accessories, lingerie). They’re as if disconnected from life yet they intimate biological routines, such as sleeping (or ovulating). Bazo’s enclosed characters are in a sort of limbo: busy and occupation-free, saturated and empty, free and trapped.

The artist suggests in “Rutilante” that the opposing forces that fill and empty life are in affective rather than material equilibrium. On one hand, there’s the gravity of her compositional order, her serial repetition and her allusions to routine as a pattern that is traced on our very lives. On the other hand, there’s the playful character of her images, the reminiscences of childhood channelled through her objects, and the sensuous range that her colour and shapes put forward.

In other words, what Bazo engages is the emotional ambivalence that we place ourselves in the world with, and from which we determine its meaning. Full and empty are affectively determined categories: a silence can be a full reply just as a discourse can be affectively equal to silence to someone awaiting a truth. In the end, Carolina Bazo’s “Rutilante” allegorizes the sort of abyss in which we inevitably float, as if sleeping, as if playing, as if living.

Max Hernández Calvo, February 2011