Carla Arocha

moniquemeloche gallery, Chicago
Through October 13

Carla Arocha is a consummate designer and brings a scintillating vocabulary of pattern and material to contemporary abstract painting. Using a variety of supports—the slick reflective surface of mirrored Plexiglas, the dense richness of velvet, as well as the more traditional stretched canvas or paper—Arocha persistently flirts with the world of appearances.

Her newest body of work, exhibited under the title Underground, considers the effects of Sarin gas on eyesight and perception. Used in the terrorist attack on the Tokyo subway in the mid-’90s, the gas constricts the pupil, preventing light from reaching the optical nerve.

Perhaps the painting In the Dark (2001) is the conceptual key to the show. A field of pale blue vertical stripes is interrupted by two small black spots approximately eye-width apart, yet while they are the size and scale of peepholes, these two circular marks are opaque and flat, thus suppressing the illusion of seeing “into” or “behind” the canvas.

Umbrella (2001) photo-realistically depicts the interior view of two open umbrellas, which may allude more specifically to eye function in the opening and closing of the pupil. The most ambitious work is a site-specific installation which, viewed from the office’s loft area, fittingly uses the gallery’s voluminous sunken space where Arocha has constructed a massive knee-high platform. The surface is subtly divided into four equal bands, each painted a very pale color; on top, she has meticulously arranged rectilinear mirrors of various size and proportion.

The piece is completed by a large painting comprised of a piece of stretched black velvet hung onto the adjacent wall. The effect from above is illusory: one’s perception shifts from grasping the surface as a two-dimensional image, to also seeing the reflected wooden ceiling beams above. These works, like others by Arocha, are always most compelling when regarded within the construct of painting. Her precise organization of the mirrors, her attention to formal tension and balance, and her acute sense of color make a dazzlingly contribution to the perennial debate of illusion or object, representation or abstraction.




Michelle Grabner