O Sole Mio

Kitchen Window

Reading ‘O Sole Mio’ on a sunny lockdown afternoon in London, the line ‘Your windowpanes shine’ suddenly evoked a strong childhood memory. A summer sunset at the house where I grew up, being in the garden, lying on the grass, the sun striking the house and reflecting in the kitchen window, beautiful and blinding.

I have spent two decades attempting to capture the beauty of light, and its ability to transform structure, through sculpture, installation, performance and painting. And especially the transcendental effect it can have on overlooked parts of our city.

My most recent series of works on paper focused on Beirut and were abstracted views of petrol stations in and around the city. However, this new work on paper, titled Kitchen Window, naturally comes from a more personal place. It is an expression of light, of course, but also seems fitting for this challenging time, when we must all remain at home as much as possible, until effective ways to fight Covid-19 are developed and refined. Like many others, I’m sure, I’m using this time to reflect and connect different parts of my life. This work is an expression of that sunlight from many years ago, illuminating the path ahead.

Light and movement are crucial elements of Nathaniel Rackowe’s practice. Inspired by the urban environment, the primary impetus of his work is the growth and shifting nature of a city. In his large-scale architectural structures and light sculptures, he often uses recognisable urban infrastructure and industrial products, such as scaffolding poles, corrugated plastics, concrete, breeze blocks and strip lights. After deconstructing the very notion of a structure, he rebuilds it tangibly and adds an element of light. By recreating the experience of navigating the urban landscape, he emphasises those often-overlooked in-between spaces, where light fluctuates from negative to positive. Each material he uses has specific associations that are reiterated through his distortion of their original function.

Inspired by constructivist and deconstructionist artists such as Vladimir Tatlin, Richard Serra, and Gordon Matta-Clark, Rackowe’s works also pay homage to the artists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. Similarly, Rackowe uses mass-produced industrial materials together with an element of light to create contemporary monuments that enliven our urban reality.

Nathaniel Rackowe (1975–) was born in Cambridge, UK, and is currently based in London.

Mon soleil à moi

‘Mais pourquoi il pleur le monsieur? Il est triste d’être tout seul?’ The sad face of a grown-up man appeared on our brand-new black-and-white TV and we all went quiet to hear the sound of this strangely beautiful lamenting voice. French was the only language I spoke then, and O Sole Mio, in my three-year-old head, meant moi, seul. As for me, I was never alone. I shared a very large noisy room of the children’s hospital with many other kids who, like me, recovered from the scourge inflicted upon us during the polio epidemic. Together, we filled the whitewashed spaces with strident screams and laughter, banging about for attention. And life was another play-day in our world, as we imagined and fashioned it between the many rows of tiny hospital beds. I remember the immense room very well with its large naked windows, which went all the way up to the ceiling. We were too small to reach the windowsills to see what was outside, although this did not concern us at all.

Our indifference may have been to do with the strangeness that came through the large swinging doors every now and then. Strange smells, strange colours, strange outfits, all clashed with the bright, whitewashed, antiseptic environment in which we lived, in slow motion. But from the windows every morning came a ray of light, incandescing everything in its course. It visited each of our beds, in which we lay every night strapped into the plaster moulds that supposedly corrected our bodies while we slept. Each of us would wait our turn to be in the blinding light, to be transported elsewhere. We seized our brief moments in the sun, dancing in our beds, paralyzed from the waist down, screaming with joy, and doing silly things, imagining we were on stage. When the light passed and everything went dark again, we could, for a little while longer, enjoy the brightest moment of the day captured and glowing still on our retinas, until it slowly faded away. We giggled, eyes closed.

When I turned 5, I was to be moved to a room on the other side of the building with the older children. I was quite excited about it, until I was told that the sun would not be able to visit the new room, that I would miss my daily ray of sunshine and would have to learn to live without it. I was inconsolable, until someone told me, ‘But you can take it with you in your pocket!’

By then, I knew what the song really meant. It meant that sunshine is something you have, and that you can take it with you everywhere you go. Mine was in the right-hand pocket of my overalls. And whenever things turned too dark for me, I would put my hand in my pocket to find it there … I could feel it at the tip of my fingers.

More than sixty years later, the world is once again going through a crisis … once again we are reminded that the enemy is invisible … that it has infected our planet. And when we look at pictures of our beautiful planet to better comprehend what is happening to us, we are again reminded that, in the greater scheme of things, we are as invisible as the virus.

These days, more often than usual, I find my hand in my pocket … and it makes me smile to find it is still there, secretly shining.

Space is central to Canan Tolon’s work, especially in the way it is visualised, politicised, imagined and remembered. Tolon is known for her seemingly abstract paintings made using geometric motifs and a limited colour palette, yet her technique for creating space with oil painted on canvas, lends itself to painstaking investigation, premeditation and control. Formally precise, rhythmic and structured, her works are at the same time elusive, transient and contain an element of surprise, which prompts viewers to re-evaluate the illusionistic composition of architectural structures and landscapes. Although her paintings are informed by her own photographic experience and skill, she uses no collage or printing techniques. Rather, she uses straight edges and knives to produce an effect of ‘instant reality’.

Born in Istanbul, Canan Tolon (1955–) now lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA, and in Istanbul, Turkey. In 2014, Parasol unit presented Sidesteps, Canan Tolon’s first major solo exhibition in a London institution.

Sunroom

Inspired by his borderland experiences and his own Mexican-American heritage, the artist Adrian Esparza comments on political divides and explores material culture by ‘re-instilling lost value in found objects’. He first gained international recognition with his deconstruction of the Mexican serape, which he often uses as the source material for much of his large-scale wall installations. Influenced by modern architecture, physical landscapes and mid-century minimalist artists, Esparza creates dramatic geometric drawings and structures of extraordinary volume, depth and perspective. By weaving the unravelled cotton thread of the serape through a grid of nails, the artist diffuses colour and expands space to form a vibrant optical experience.

Adrian Esparza (1970–) was born in El-Paso, Texas, USA, where he now lives and works. In 2012, Parasol unit presented his work, So Fast and Slow, 2012, in the group show Lines of Thought, an exhibition that explored the work of 15 contemporary artists whose practice has focused on using line in creatively challenging ways.

Córdoba

The Córdoba works are inspired by the utopian movement of designers, interior designers and architects formed during the Modern Movement in the 1950s, who, in the early years of the Cuban Revolution, worked on a project that could be considered an aesthetic revolution. This group would assume responsibility for projecting and producing new spaces that would modulate the life of the supposed ‘new man’. It was about more austere and more practical furniture and objects, with cutting-edge design, sometimes suggestive of Scandinavian and early Ikea designs. By the late 1970s, however, the movement had been abandoned, primarily due to the inability of official institutions to comprehend it and their ensuing stigmatisation of the project, dismissing it as ‘bourgeois taste’. With the Córdoba series, the artist splits in two and takes on the role of a designer of that era to revive a tradition that disappeared from Cuba in the early 1980s.

Marco Castillo’s wood and rattan works are rooted in the designs of Cuban modernist practice, juxtaposing a colonial and traditional past with the more ideological and figurative influences of the 1960s and 70s. The pieces take on Soviet-era designs and intertwine them with traditional elements of Cuban production, such as latticework and rattan. The artist explains that the work Córdoba, 2019, represents ‘the metamorphosis of a circle into a five-pointed star, operating as a metaphor for the formal and ideological evolution, or involution. The piece can be read in both directions – cyclically – from the star to the circle and vice versa.’ The works from this series bear the names of Cuban architects and designers of the time. Notably, Córdoba, 2019, refers to Gonzalo Córdoba who led the Design Department of the Cuban production company EMPROVA, and originally designed the offices and private residences for high government officials. By juxtaposing historical political emblems with woven rattan, Castillo establishes an artistic aesthetic and narrative procedure that entwines native, Nordic and African influences with Cuban tradition, including its interpretation of Modernism and the country’s political, social and economic trajectories, striving to position Cuba within a global history of exchange and influence.

Marco A. Castillo (1971–) was born in Cuba and now lives and works between Havana and Mérida, Mexico. He is a founder member of the Cuban artist collective Los Carpinteros (The Carpenters). Much of his work is informed by the history of Cuba and its post-revolutionary, social and cultural changes. His knowledge of architecture, design and sculpture is fundamental to his installations, drawings and sculptures, which engage with space, conceptually fuse the functional and non-functional, and make use of traditional artisan skills and humour.

Castillo’s oeuvre is one of the most important and internationally influential to come out of Latin America in recent decades. In tandem with other global movements of historical revision, Castillo reflects on Cuba’s modernisation in the 1960s and 70s and the works of its most respected artists, architects and designers. From a political standpoint, Castillo seeks to follow the historic trail of these artists, while positioning himself as an advocate and herald for Cuban artistic heritage. The sculptures and works on paper of his most recent project draw on elements of the modern design and socialist realism of Cuba’s Soviet period, using traditional Cuban techniques and materials, such as mahogany wood and rattan.