ArtSeen
Marek Cecula: Interface
Where do you end and I begin?
Marek Cecula’s exhibition titled Interface at Garth Clark references the perfect, seamless union of two people enmeshed to the point where individual identity is dissolved. Observed en masse, Interface recalls a display of exquisite archeological artifacts. Employing a call modernist aesthetic that erases any possibility of sentimentality, Cecula presents refined and idealized porcelain cast sculptures of body parts associated with human communication—speaking, hearing, touching, seeing. He displays them on elegant birch blocks that are labeled with engraved brass plaques, indicating the title of the series, the set, and its number in the edition. The style of these tags suggests a memorial inscription, while the information given is reminiscent of a museum label, documenting a significant historical phenomenon; in this case, the artist provides us with a type of iconographic marker that evidences human intercourse through the ages.
Cecula’s sculptures serve a dual function: they act as symbols of human interaction/communication and also as tools to facilitate the viewer in achieving a sense of actual interface. Slightly larger than life, some of the casts are hollow, like Egyptian sarcophagi. They invite one to imagine placing one’s own body in the open-ended, container-like spaces, and in this way the sculptures become vessels of empathy. Like a figure in a Casper David Friedrich painting shown with his back to us before a magnificent landscape, the viewer quite naturally steps into that setting and inhabits that body, so to speak. Here, Cecula affords us the opportunity to imagine ourselves in a state of unified bliss.
The most arresting subject for this transference was a set of three pairs of cast “gloves.” In this series, the cast vessels look inflated, with rounded edges alluding to the human presence that would fill and animate them. One glove of each pair does not sit flush with the surface beneath, but rises almost pneumatically, enhancing the idea of it as a portal for energy. Each pair of gloves is joined seamlessly at the three center fingers, to make one flowing channel between the two. In profile, the channel forms an S-curve much like an infinity symbol. Smooth, matte, and pore-less, the gloves are in a sense generic, a stand-in for every and any set of hands, while their interiors are of brilliant gold, asserting the sacredness of that which is exchanged over the mere conduit it flows through, and allusion to the metaphor of our bodies as simply vessels for our souls. Inordinately graceful, they poetically represent the notion of two becoming one and create a universal symbol of intimacy.
Stripped to the essentials, Cecula’s body of work offers much more than mere poetic waxings about romantic love or physical intimacy, but poignantly proffers a notion of the eternal, the possibility that the energy created and shared between human beings lasts.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition
By Ann C. CollinsDEC 22–JAN 23 | ArtSeen
More than 180 of Meret Oppenheims workspaintings, sculptures, object constructions, drawings, collages, and printsare jam-packed into Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition, an ebullient if at times overwhelming retrospective.

Losing My Identity
By Boris GroysJUNE 2022 | Critics Page
Today, there is a lot of talk about identity. Identity is supposed to be something that connects us to the pastthat we carry inside us through the present towards the future. When we speak about our identity, we mean not only our own personal past but also our ancestry, the culture in which we were raised, the people to which we belong. Can we abandon our identity? It seems that such an operation is impossible. Even if we have migrated into a different country and culture then it is still possible to trace our route back to its origin and thus reconstruct our identity.
Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity
By Barbara A. MacAdamSEPT 2022 | ArtSeen
The seven artists in this exhibitionall born in mainland China between 1979 and 1987are represented by nineteen works that range from video to performance to installations, digital art, painting, and more. Each tells a different story with wit, curiosity, techno savvy, painterly skill, and/or sociability.
Leland Bell: Paint, Precision, and Placement. A Centennial Exhibition
By John GoodrichOCT 2022 | ArtSeen
Any ambitious painter faces a conundrum: what can a painting say today that hasnt already been said? Some artists, chastened by the historical record, may phrase it a little differently: how to paint something worth hanging on a wall, when the walls of our museums already boast the most extraordinary paintings? Leland Bell (1922-1991), who would have turned one hundred years old this fall, was possessed by the second of these challenges. His centennial show at the New York Studio School, which includes some two dozen paintings and drawings selected by curator Steven Harvey, puts on full, luminous display his passions, insights and struggles.