Dra. Lily Kassner

Tema: 
Architecture in the sculptural work of Gloria Carrasco
Año: 
2009

Dedication and vocational devotion have been intertwined regularly in the life of Gloria Carrasco, to achieve the excellent handiwork of her pieces in high temperature ceramics, with slips, oxides and glazes, and in some of her creations, with the integration of elements in metal, wood, or acrylic.

With educated pictorial good taste, her work presents in this way examples or artistic sets of a simple and stark polychrome, with accused tonal tendency and undeniably plastic and visual beauty.

Her brilliant labor as a ceramic sculptor is intimately linked with her profession as an architect, and, more specifically, with her Masters in Urbanisms at the Faculty of Architecture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

In this respect, the main concern for urbanist Gloria Carrasco is the constructive indolence that is accommodated in the accelerated and chaotic growth which we experience in the city’s present since, as she well says, this “originates de collapse of planning and translates as the transit of a solid and stable modernity to a situation of ever-changing situations… (…) where the relinquishment of the utopia and the provisional solutions give the contemporary city a permanent identity (…), always in conditions of uncertainty in regards to an unpredictable world.”

The pertinence of her urbanistic reflections is also corroborated through another quote: “The historical function of cities as a refuge against danger has been inverted, as the city becomes the source of danger”.

These quotes from the thinking of the plastic artist and architect are relevant because of the urban theme or her exhibition Fragile Cities, where, based in “the house as icon and cell of the city” she proposes “forms and images recovered from the urban environment”, which is shaped by “reliefs, sculptures and installations”.

Glorified by its grace and charm and presided by an accurate formal abstraction that synthesizes their configuration the sculptural representations of these edifications, solitary or as an ensemble, participate as well of a very free sense of humor, befitting a restless and agile imagination, such as that of Gloria Carrasco.

It is the case, for example, in Condominios, the fickle tower of over imposing and piled up modules, an image of the identical houses of such constructive gatherings, which sufficiently illustrates the crowding and monotony of apartments cloned ad nauseam  and the visual uniformity displayed by said contemporary housing units.

Even though vertical structures are the majority, there are also horizontal ones, and some are city maps where iconic facade forms represent houses with identical windows in different locations over them, with something of the spirit of naïve painting in their resolution.

A pair of double colored skyscrapers, in black (the floors and the top antenna) and white (the structure), as many of the pieces in this exhibition, denote a playful and even cartoonish character, as in this case that reminisces of the Torre Latinoamericana, symbol of modernity, even if somewhat provincial, during the last Century, when the collective imaginary longed to inhabit, even if it was only in some centric streets, in a first world city.

Gloria Carrasco, who has, with reason, to study museography and curatorship, proposes a montage as a “narrative sequence” that refers to us a   path through the different urban areas, symbolically located in different halls in the museum, to emphasize their contrasts and differences.

We applaud of her work not only the theoretical coherence that supports it and its inherent aesthetic qualities, but also the versatility it shows, evident result of the masterly command of diverse techniques and processes of a consummated ceramist.