Eminently formal works of art, Alejandra Laviada’s Cyanotypes (Cianotipos) could perfectly forego commentary: they can and should be appreciated without preambles; they should be enjoyed without whys and wherefores.
Examined, nevertheless, as landmarks in a process of creative concatenations—the set of works, as recent as they are diverse, that the artist presents under the generic title ENSAMBLE (Assembly) —Cyanotypes could benefit from a few annotations that draw us a bit closer to what is at play within them.
ENSAMBLE transits multidisciplinary paths of creation—ascending, descending—that move the concrete toward the abstract.
The first, a photographic journey, begins in a furniture market, not far from Toluca. Pinewood dressers, bookcases and chairs are for sale there. Handmade furniture, empirically crafted. The pieces are honest, functional, a little coarse, perhaps, but a few embellishments are allowed. Laviada began by creating a photographic repertoire of some of them, hoisted on the backs of their makers. It becomes...clear that in her mode of seeing, the furniture doesn’t interest her as furnishings: their forms are what seduce her.
With this ascertainment, the path now bifurcates. The artist concentrates on cataloguing photographically the positioning of the furniture balanced in stake body trucks, which are used for transportation. The surroundings (and the truck itself) are withheld from our view, for Laviada seeks something very pure: compact assemblages of undefined, wood-colored furniture. Tense ropes keep them anchored. A red flannel rag—to prevent accidents—adds a note of color. A massive, involuntary sculpture emerges, whose composition corresponds to the criteria of efficiency: the equilibrium of different masses, the maximum load capacity of a given space. Laviada captures, too, the furniture covered in brightly colored tarps that protect the merchandise while in transit.
The term “secularization” is often used to mean the process of emptying the original purpose of a system of signs. Or of an object. By becoming secularized, which is to say, by finding itself divested of its function, Alejandra Laviada’s furniture can be recontextualized and, through aesthetics, recovered as artistic objects. With this operation, the artist questions and shatters the proverbial notion that “Form follows function.”
And the creative path sets out to ascend new heights when Laviada decides to acquire an entire lot of motley furniture.
Once inside her own workshop, the artist labors to deconstruct the pieces of furniture by dint of dismantling them, removing nails and screws, cutting them with a saw. Her efforts produce a sizeable yield of legs, frames, cross supports, rails, backrests and thick bars with which she begins to work—“Form follows form”— and to assemble a series of sculptures. (This is a prolongation of Laviada’s conceptual line of unusual installations, having first improvised with diverse detritus in buildings fated for demolition, whose images she captured, thus capturing for the first time our attention.)
Laviada has referred to these new sculptural presences as Totems.
Doubtless because verticality governs them. She proceeds to take their portrait.
Once photographed, the Totems are transubstantiated—yet another metamorphosis—without losing their materiality: cast in resin, each one becomes the copy of itself, supplanting itself, and once again, the original is disaggregated in a heap of boards, frames, posts and profiles. New raw materials.
The raw materials for the Cyanotypes in question...
Relegated to oblivion, the cyanotype is an old-fashioned process of photographic printing that dispenses with both silver salts and a camera obscura. The image is formed as a negative in a solution of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide. On the photosensitized sheet, the parts covered by opaque bodies are not printed; those exposed to the light are. After exposure and rinsing, the image appears, all in surprising opacities of blue. In the world of fine art photography, the photogram—the term that denominates printing through contact without the mediation of a camera—refers us to Man Ray’s rayographs, undoubtedly to Moholy-Nagy’s shadows of solid bodies, to William Klein’s shifting and abstract geometries on the covers of DOMUS.
The creative gesture in Laviada’s Cyanotypes resides in the immediate composition of ephemeral assemblages directly on sheets of photosensitive paper made out of a repertoire of parts from the broken furniture. This requires a true intuition of form, and complete confidence in the process. Light does its part. The cotton paper acknowledges receipt. The operation brokers the passage of the three-dimensionality of the object—wood as volume—to the two-dimensionality of the image—its shadow on a flat plane. Only then can the haphazard results be judged by the artist, in the bluish play of overlapping shapes.
Personally—to each his or her own references—Alejandra Laviada’s Cyanotypes take me back to certain rhythmical friezes by Carlos Mérida at his most geometric, to a colorblind El Lissitsky, or—I’m thinking about a spectacular piece, configured horizontally, in which the totemic profiles are fully recognizable—to a nocturnal jungle by Wifredo Lam, as if passed through two uncompromising filters: the rigors of geometry, and the austere and elegant hues of Prussian blue.
But ENSAMBLE doesn’t pause its incessant chain of metamorphosis. Once again, creation’s path loops the loop: Alejandra Laviada returns the execution of her work to others’ hands, to the skilled fingers of artisans, by placing a Cyanotype, like a matrix, within the warp and weft of a loom. Through its translation into another medium—the textile—it can simultaneously be image and matter.
Now that the loop’s been looped, what’s seen has been seen, what’s said has been said, let’s enjoy without whys or wherefores these surprising and provocative Cyanotypes.
Alain-Paul Mallard
Barcelona, April 2021
Translated by Sarah Pollack
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Alejandra Laviada (b. 1980, Mexico City) studied paintng at the Rhode Island School of Design and completed her Masters degree in Photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She is a member of the photography collective Piece of Cake (www.cake-collective.com) since 2011.
Laviada's work explores photography’s shifting role and relationship to other artistic media, such as painting and sculpture. The images rise from the intersections between these different mediums, and aim to question and reflect on the ways photography can redefine the very meaning and materiality of sculpture. Her practice integrates different mediums such as photography, painting, sculpture and silk screening.
Laviada’s photographs have received several awards including Photo España's Descubrimientos Prize, First Prize at the Photography Biennial in Mexico, and the FONCA Young Creators grant. Her work has been exhibited widely and is in the permanent collection of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, Bank of America Collection, and the Fundación Televisa Collection, among others.
Entrada actualizada el el 06 may de 2021
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