Argentine Arcadia   Sept 13 - Oct 6, 2007
Artwork by Marcela Cabutti & Monica Millan

THUMBNAILS   |   PRICELIST   |   PRESS RELEASE


MARCELA CABUTTI (b. 1967)


BIOGRAPHY

Although the works of fantasy and magical transformation by the Argentinean artist Marcela Cabutti can be associated with Surrealism, they are more specifically connected with the rich Argentinean literary tradition of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig, and Ernesto Sábato, whose writings Cabutti has passionately absorbed. As in the short stories of Borges and Cortázar, shifting points of view and a metaphysical sense of time and place are essential aspects of Cabutti’s work. For the artist, a challenge has been to capture the narrative moment and the varying perspectives of literature in visual form. Making us see with a child’s sense of innocence and magic, her works are also multi-leveled, with naïveté often overlaid with a self-conscious awareness, while sometimes it is the other way around. Indeed, usually there are several levels of recognition and experience in her art.

A flower of epoxy and resin is blue and large, evoking the surprise of a child discovering it in a garden, yet the flower also seems over-mechanized and perhaps too blue, as if to remind us that a garden itself consists of controlled and transformed nature. Her landscapes, enclosed within glowing boxes, have an antediluvian look, like mountains and lakes in a formative stage, yet that a landscape could be boxed, and that a small box could represent a larger world, is recognized by the way that Cabutti has “gift-wrapped” these forms. There is a metaphor in the way that these simply made watery landscapes have been set within complex constructions, wired electrically. Even the volcano within a box is less complicated than its outer packaging.

Cabutti has also used photography to invert layers of reality. Epoxy and resin cacti stand against photographs of these sculptures. While the images seem larger in scale than their source, they are no less real than the epoxy creations—made to seem perhaps more diminutive than they would without this juxtaposition. For other works, Cabutti has made aluminum leaves and hung them on a real tree, which she then photographs. In her final images, the aluminum leaves are hung onto the photographs including images of them.

A group of nine painted blue women add further to Cabutti’s plays on reality. All the women have the same bodies, reflecting submissiveness, yet their differently sprouting-plant heads convey their inner spiritedness; while evoking the garden in a child’s imagination coming to life at night, an adult awareness and sense of irony preside among these succulent creatures.
Sophisticated in their process, Cabutti’s works remind us of the bittersweet desire within each of us to freeze our childhoods with the knowing awareness of this impossibility.

Marcela Cabutti was born in 1967 in La Plata, the capital city of the Buenos Aires Province in Argentina. She graduated in 1994 from La Plata National University School of Fine Arts with degrees in sculpture and art history. In 1995-96 she was given a grant by the Antorchas Foundation to participate in a workshop run by the artists Luis F. Benedit and Pablo Suárez in which she created sculpture, objects, and installations. The foundation also supported Cabutti’s studies at the European Institute of Design in Milan, Italy, from which she received her masters of design and bionics in 1998. In that year Cabutti was given a grant by the Delfina Studio Trust, London. In 2000 she received grants from the Medici Foundation (in support of her artist residency at the Duende Ateliers, Rotterdam) and from the Columbus College of Art and Design (Ohio), where she served as the resident glass artist. Her awards have included a First Biennial for a Young Artist, Buenos Aires (1993) and the First Regional Award from OSDE Foundation, Buenos Aires (2005). Cabutti’s art has been included in exhibitions in Buenos Aires; Milan; Madrid; Norway, Rome; Rosario, Argentina; and Turin, Italy. She has been included in several books, including Jorge López Anaya’s Arte argentino: Cuatro siglos de historia (1600-2000), covering four centuries of art in Argentina.