NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Arturo Herrera’s practice is varied, intricate, and economic, seemingly abstract yet ordered by references to children’s imagery and Disney nightmares. When he first began to make collages, they were attached to the fronts of large white envelopes sent to friends. Receiving a letter from Herrera was a surprise: your name and address handwritten on the same surface as a collage cut from his by-now signature coloring-book illustrations. These were direct forms of private communication between artist and viewer, yet they had traveled through the mail system, had been seen, stamped, and handled by postal workers before they reached their final destination. The notion of strangers and unsuspecting viewers being involved in the process and distribution of personal narrative was somehow exciting and suggestive. The fluidity between private and public spheres, how the usually private, occasionally sexual, can be transferred to the public while still protecting that intimate exchange is central to all of Herrera’s art.
Herrera’s spare installation, Within a Few Days, demonstrates that his every decision depends on painstaking consideration and numerous trials, even erudition, as he sifts through his resource materials producing work that taps the unconscious. The entire gallery becomes a kind of four-walled theatrical collage in which Herrera has choreographed the space and located flat, abstract forms; the title suggests anticipation but withholds the main event. On the most prominent wall are three door-sized panels, particleboard painted a bold yellow that initially looks like a triptych of color-field monochromes. On closer inspection, one notices that they are identically incised with two vertical and three horizontal lines. This essential pairing of vertical with horizontal is fundamental iconography: figure/ground, male/female, needle/vein, or a bit like the yellow traffic signs that signal bodies to yield—in this case, one linear form leaning and insinuating itself into the recumbent space of the other. What is uncanny about this seemingly straightforward, immaculately finished abstract work is the fact that it exists as three identical versions. Why three of the same? Doubling can be construed as a pair, a reflection, but a triad of replication is unsettling, unnatural, or perhaps a corruption of the spirituality associated with the trinity. Herrera’s trinity, where nothing changes and each perfect incision is identical to the others, shifts the notion of sameness to an uncomfortable, almost stubborn formal declaration. His wooden panels partake of both painting and sculpture, popular culture and high-art references, but foreground the background: they begin with what is usually discarded—the woodblock of a print—or repressed—for example, the sexual curiosity of children—to dramatically reverse figure-ground expectations.
Blurring the difference between simple binaries, such as part to whole, Herrera’s negotiations occur dramatically when we notice a knee-high panel placed at floor level in the corner of the room. Recognizable as a pile of cropped forms reassembled from bits and pieces of the Bambi character, it has been sacrificed forever to the architecture of the gallery. Appearing to plunge below the floor so that only the deer’s back and underbelly are visible and vulnerable, the work becomes unsettling, an icon of victimization rerouted from popular culture to be installed elegantly as architectural ornament. Finally, on an adjacent wall at eye level, a smaller, rounded form is painted white, but its smooth, almost translucent surface is flecked with tiny black lines, like staple marks, like tears or raindrops in a cloud. I cannot come up with a real-world analogy for this scalloped shape, but somehow it completes the anti-narrative of the three walls, the aborted animal form, and the trio of yellow paintings; perhaps it is a cartoon bubble, the cloud that may indeed unleash rain in a few days.
Still, 2000. Polyurethane paint on MDF. 25 × 28 in.
In ArtPace’s conference room, Herrera provides more clues in a series of ten collages built upon the usually unseen backsides of pages from books for miniature paper dioramas of Victorian buildings and the like. These reverse sides are printed with a few geometric shapes, which he doctors by adding delicate lines, a bit of color, or a fragmented image from a children’s story. This exquisite group offers another muted iconography, a conceptual reduction of the vestigial anecdotal narrative implied by the children’s-book borrowings. Logical directions are contradicted and reverse sides become the departure points for poetic compositions. From what remains after the deletions, Herrera creates his world.
Cutting and pasting are fundamental to Herrera’s method, most notably in his collage series. His harmonic practice always depends on a sequence of refined decisions; each slice out of a figure, each addition of a detail, and each selection of color are calibrated, as are part to whole, interior to exterior, and unique to multiple. Whether producing enormous cut-felt hangings, wall paintings, or works on paper, Herrera traffics in the transformative detail, the one small addition or subtraction that radically alters meaning. The most delicate cropping can forever alter the way one views an image. For example, in Herrera’s black-and-white, rather mundane photograph of the top of a tree, the image is framed so it resembles the profile of a poodle. Another photograph of the fleshy back of a male figure, however ordinary, reveals bulges and orifices that are overtly suggestive and disconcerting.
Here, 2000. Polyurethane paint on MDF. Three panels, each 68 × 48 in.
There is something Nabokovian about Herrera’s sensibility—the refined, decorous presentation and implicit eroticism. The duration of our initial pleasure, recognizing some imagery from childhood, lasts only a second as cheerful recollection, after which we confront a helpless Bambi, twice victimized—once through the lens of Disney and then literally sliced apart by Herrera to become a beautiful form in the corner of a room. Herrera’s grafts are so deft as to appear formally correct: one shape dissolves seamlessly into another, and everything is kept intact within the lines. In this artificial imagination, Hollywood creatures and soft baby animals become ready-made surrogates for his unconscious, vulnerable to both the artist’s knife and the viewer’s pleasure. Although Herrera’s source materials are secondhand fables of transformations and repressed sexuality, what makes his work remarkable is the way he manipulates them so that figuration, cut up and reassembled, becomes abstraction rather than other narratives. Herrera’s well-mannered modes of presentation and immaculate finish are nevertheless the public presentation of cuts, incisions. His hybrid inventions are just familiar enough that their alteration ever so subtly disrupts conventional narratives so that the tone of the installation shifts between whimsy and warning. Less about an analysis of mass culture than a demonstration of an unimaginable vision or nightmare, Herrera’s work offers an opportunity to repossess our childhood obsessions and fantasies.
Judith Russi Kirshner
Untitled, 2000. Collage. 18e × 12b in.
Untitled, 2000. Collage. 18e × 12b in.
All Day, 2000. Polyurethane paint on MDF. 13e × 6f in.
