 Rimer Cardillo: Insecto II, from the series "Insecto," 1973-1974. |
On the other hand, it is quite possible to become overly concerned with technique, focusing so intently on sheer proficiency with the materials at hand that the "big picture" is lost, and the work loses any sense of larger meaning.
An exhibition now on view at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz demonstrates what can happen when an artist marries amazing technical innovation with an astute feeling for the specifics of place and political context. Rimer Cardillo, professor of printmaking in the art department at New Paltz, is having his first career retrospective, covering almost 40 years of work.
And what a career it's been. A native of Uruguay, Cardillo first studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Montevideo in a program that thoroughly grounded him in various print media; he then spent three years in post-graduate study in Berlin and Leipzig - in schools that at the time were located in East Germany. There he was introduced to the modernist rigors by instructors who had studied at the original Bauhaus. They impressed on him a precise sense of line and color, and encouraged him to work in multiple techniques - engraving, aquatint, drypoint, and so on - on a single print, exploiting the salient characteristics of each as he worked on a series, Floating and Flying Objects, which delves into an abstracted, almost Surrealist alternative reality.
Shortly after his return to Uruguay, a military junta took power, as happened in so many other South American countries in the 1960s and '70s. Working under strict censorship, Cardillo managed to veil, yet still express, his anti-militarist political sentiments in a series called Chicharras y mariposas nocturnas (Cicadas and Moths), assembled as a group in this exhibition for the first time since they were first shown in Uruguay. These large, multi-color photo-silkscreen prints magnify close-up views of these insects, with their almost alien-looking antennae, enormous eyes, and intricate wing structures. Through the series, Cardillo repeats images from a small group of screens, multiplying them across the sheet (in a pseudo-military procession) or printing them across or over one another (suggesting political turmoil), and in the process locates a safe mode of expression within an atmosphere of intense repression.
The junta eventually broke up the art school (seen as a hotbed of leftist sentiment), literally taking apart the print studio and destroying its presses. Cardillo's own studio became his refuge, a place for him to live and work (safe from strict street curfews), as well as a place to take up some of the work of the lost school, as he invited others to come work on his presses. He continued his fascination with insects and nature, making a huge series of Objetos grafico-ecologicos (Graphic-Ecological Objects) that involved casting polyester resin plates that are then used to make sculptural, embossed prints. Individually hand-colored, these discrete objects are housed in small wooden boxes, which are grouped together in a larger box. The effect is a cross between an entomologist's vitrine and a religious reliquary. Trapped in these glass-fronted boxes, the works suggest the closed-in feeling of living under repression.
Cardillo was at one point arrested by the authorities, owing to his participation in a calendar issued by a printmaking workshop that was deemed critical of the regime. Unlike thousands of others, he was lucky to escape relatively unscathed. Eventually he received an offer to teach at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, which enabled him to immigrate to the U.S. Since that time, he's pursued his unique blend of ecological, political, and cultural themes, often related to South American themes, as in his Baroque Suite, a series of prints recombining images and architectural details from colonialist Latin American Baroque churches.
Boxes continue to figure prominently in Cardillo's work, functioning as both literal and figurative containers. In one striking image, a beetle emerges from a tightly composed, shallow box in the center of a large sheet of paper. The area surrounding the box is inked a continuous flat, metallic gray, while the rhomboid opening of the box is depressed into the surface, adding an uncanny, almost real dimension to the illusionistic image. With its scientifically accurate rendering of the insect, this single print manages to bridge times and cultures, connecting Albrecht Dürer's Renaissance nature studies to Bauhaus abstraction to South American concretism to the contemporary Uruguayan political situation to Minimalism. (Wow.)
Since taking his current position at New Paltz in 1994, Cardillo has moved into larger, installation format work, which often deals with environmental issues and frequently interweaves cultural issues, drawing parallels between the extinction of animal species and the extermination of native peoples, but understanding it all from a perspective that is conscious of the artist's own position as a product of the colonizing culture. Perhaps the most valuable (and interesting) aspect of his work is his capacity for layering influences and shades of meaning as deftly as he does print processes themselves. The accrued body of work now on display at the Dorsky is testament to the fact that pure technical expertise can be completely integrated into a larger, contextually aware aesthetic vision.
Another exhibition that demonstrates tremendous technical command conjoined to compelling ideas is "Shades of Darkness," an exhibition of drawings by Pablo Shine at UCCC. Done in charcoal, ink, and sometimes pastel on rolls of heavy, textured watercolor paper (some are eight feet high), these enormous drawings take a serious look at the dark side of life. In one triptych, Shine focuses on Samuel Beckett's deeply creased, ur-Existential face, incorporating obscured, handwritten passages from his plays in the background. His technique mixes media, and at times includes picking away at the surface of the paper with dental tools to create passages of tone and texture. The scale and ambition of this body of work make it an appropriate complement to the Cardillo exhibition, and yet another example of the rich possibilities of technique when married to deep content.