text by Patrick R. Crowley
In the fifth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Empedocles advanced an influential theory to explain why children don’t always look like their parents (a phenomenon that modern biology simply calls variation):
How do offspring come to resemble others rather than their parents? Fetuses are shaped by the imagination of the woman around the time of conception. For often women have fallen in love with statues of men and with images and have produced offspring which resemble them.
Empedocles’s “embryology” was heavily influenced by ancient theories of vision that consistently defined the faculty of seeing as a kind of touching—a sensory capacity that was physical, libidinal, and active. It also held much in common with contemporary medical texts. Hippocrates, for example, explained birth defects by likening the womb to a container placed around a growing cucumber, constraining its shape. Centuries later in the Roman period, the Greek physician Soranus notes that “The tyrant of the Cyprians, who was misshapen, compelled his wife to look at beautiful statues during intercourse and became the father of well-shaped children.” Deeply misogynistic and ableist attitudes about female bodies and desire in ancient thought were rooted in this basic belief that women were inherently impressionable, and could be compulsively corralled, by such outside influences. Seeing, more specifically a kind of cathected, sculptural seeing, quite literally had the power to shape the desired outcome of men.
Isabelle Albuquerque’s sculptural offspring are the products of a kinky parthenogenesis. In her recent body of work, most notably in the series Orgy for Ten People in One Body, Albuquerque explores the morphology of desire by staging a psychosexual drama that confronts the gendered legacies of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance art history. The materiality of these works encodes the symbolic density of desire—both sexual desire but also desire understood in the broader sense of a generative, productive force—and its mutability: in real human hair (Eight), long regarded as the quintessence of artistic refinement indexing the dissolution of signifier and signified (think of the hair of Botticelli’s Venus and the bristles of a paintbrush); in beeswax (Ten), a material that since antiquity has been associated with flesh and resemblance; or in vulcanized rubber (Four), which was still quite new in 1860 when Gottfried Semper called it “the factotum of industry,” fretting about what Megan R. Luke has aptly called its “stylistic promiscuity.” By submitting each of these figures to a recombinatory logic of distributed personhood bound together with gold wedding rings that symbolize a kind of ouroboros of identity, Albuquerque fashions a counterpart to the poet Arthur Rimbaud’s famously cryptic, anacoluthic formulation: “Je est un autre” (I is another). Albuquerque similarly disrupts the expected grammatical construction or syntactical consistency of her sculptural ensemble. The figures play together and perform the title, merging the composition and flow of identities in group sex (recalling Susan Sontag’s criticism of pornography as a “theater of types, never of individuals”) with a group figurative sculpture. At the same time, many of the figures are content to play with themselves: masturbating digitally, with a tapered candle, riding a broomstick. If Auguste Rodin’s Burghers of Calais remains the hallmark of civically minded group figurative sculpture, Albuquerque’s exhibitionist autoeroticism challenges the Enlightenment project of casting solitary sex as a withdrawal from social interaction and a threat to self-governance. This is sculpture in the middle voice, a construction that has no English equivalent, where the grammatical subject both performs and receives the action on or for itself.
Seizing on this duality, Isabelle Albuquerque X Robert Therrien, presented last autumn in the late artist Robert Therrien’s home-cum-studio, was an ingeniously conceived and impeccably executed collaborative exhibition. A shared sculptural language between the two artists established a clear through line across time and space and fostered the ideal conditions for a meaningful—not to mention extremely photogenic—dialogue. Both sculptors share a keen sense of scale and the embodied texture of its feeling. And it is precisely this playful relationality that pushes them in different ways to explore what the philosopher Gilbert Simondon called a “metastable” system, or a system that is neither stable nor unstable, but somehow both at once (think of the wobble between the wave and the particle). Such a system unsettles the relationship between matter and form, privileging dynamic processes of becoming over static states of being. Through a kind of embryogenesis (but a world apart from the ancient “fruit-mold theory” of the womb as sculptural matrix), individual subjects emerge through a series of productive tensions in states of “in-betweenness.” Hence Therrien’s recurring interest in what he called “figure-ground play,” both a visual polysemy where an image can mean many things at once, and a play of figure-ground relationships where things can emerge and recede from view simultaneously.
Seeing Albuquerque and Therrien together produces its own kind of “figure-ground play” of call and response. What made the exhibition so exhilarating were those all-too-rare moments when a curatorial masterstroke reveals something about an artist’s body of work that a presentation of each one individually would miss entirely. Not, of course, because there is anything lacking in each, but because the comparison draws out a freshly salient feature, producing new realities that did not previously exist or register. This is what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari meant when they argued against the orthodoxy of psychoanalysis that had long defined desire as a fundamental lack. Desire, the philosophers insisted, doesn’t lack anything; it is not the object that is missing but the subject that is missing—missing in the sense that the subject is never fixed and has yet to be constituted. Desire, according to this view, was there from the very beginning: it is a productive force that generates new objects and realities. In this sense, Albuquerque and Therrien use desire as a sculptural medium. Two examples will have to suffice to attest to the richness of their dialogue.
One of these was an exceptionally understated encounter between Therrien’s No Title (Large Blue Oval) (1988) that quietly overlooked Albuquerque’s Fleur Sauvage (2024). For Therrien, the blue oval evokes “a mirror, a female apogee, my mother” while evincing a figure-ground play that oscillates between density and vacuity, surface and depth (“Because of the edges, which recede toward the wall and create a shadow, from a distance it seems to float”). Albuquerque’s flower, on the other hand, blossoms out of her own reproductive wellspring of creativity, its notional hermaphroditic sexuality cast in stainless steel from her own vagina. The flower is a sly quotation of another sculptural instance of vegetable desire: Marcel Duchamp’s surrealist Female Fig Leaf (1950-51), which presents the negative mold of a vagina (a visual pun on the French moule, which in the masculine means a “mold” but in the feminine can mean a “mussel,” and by analogy a “vulva”) recast as a positive form, or more precisely as a double negative. Georges Didi-Huberman has observed how Duchamp exploited this gendered ambiguity that toggles between concavity and convexity in its various forms and photographic reproductions—one whose initial operation of smearing plaster over the vagina effectively conceals it, thus performing the modesty of the fig leaf. But Albuquerque’s flower is derived, at least initially, from a digital scan: photons, rather than plaster, penetrate the topography of her flesh.
What’s at stake here is what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls “invagination,” a folding back of the horizon of visibility and touch and the reflexivity of embodied existence that reveals a “fundamental narcissism.” This fundamental narcissism, a phenomenological event rather than a psychiatric diagnosis, is precisely what activates the pairing of Therrien’s non-reflecting mirror and Albuquerque’s flower: together they evoke the primal scene of specular self-seeing in Ovid’s Metamorphoses where Narcissus lies at the edge of a pool, bewitched by his desire for the beauty of his own ungraspable image. We tend to forget the most tragic aspect of Narcissus’s fate—that at one point he does indeed recognize himself (Iste ego sum, “I am he!”) but gives in to his desire anyway until he finally wasted away and turned into a flower. But just as Ovid’s Narcissus was associated in a more positive sense with the ancient philosophical maxim to “know thyself” through self-reflection, the pairing recalls the landmark Our Bodies, Ourselves published by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective in 1970 that encouraged women to examine themselves with a hand mirror in order to understand their cervix and vulva.
Or consider a pit in Therrien’s studio at least five or six feet deep. At the bottom of the pit, at its very center, we find a small version of one of the sculptor’s Flagpole pieces that uses forced perspective to enlarge the bulbous finial of its conical extension, creating the illusion that we seem to be looking down on it from high above. Except in this case, we really are looking at the flagpole from above, thus enhancing the pit’s vertiginous precarity. This time Albuquerque looms over Therrien: Venus Rising (2024), a reduced size figure of the artist robotically carved with a CNC machine from a 3D scan. She adopts the pose of Nine from the Orgy series: right hand pressed against her upper chest, left hand approximating the gesture of a Roman sculpture of Venus covering her pudenda (a euphemism borrowed from Latin for the female genitals that literally means “things to be ashamed of”), but slipping inside herself in a powerful and frank assertion of her sexuality. Famously, ancient statues of Venus conspicuously avoid the articulation of the vulva so that they embody, in the most literal fashion imaginable, a Freudian castration anxiety. Standing proud from the wall—the dowel-like supports on the back transform the supine position appropriate for tomb sculpture into the powerful stance of a vertical monument—Albuquerque’s Venus not only asserts control over her own body, but also dominates the demonstrably phallic, if comically diminutive, Flagpole. And yet, in a dizzyingly recursive game of scalar relationships, the finial of Therrien’s Flagpole doubles as a gazing ball, shrinking Venus in a distorted reflection that is more easily imagined than seen.
The play of proportions here offers more than meets the eye—or rather, is exactly what meets the eye, even if its significance can be challenging to articulate. It has become a commonplace to compare Therrien’s manipulation of scale to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, situating the domestic content of his sculptures—a colossal table, chairs the size of trees, pots and pans as big as boulders—within the world of childhood. And this is fine, as far as it goes. But it risks fixing the sense of scale as a datum point or the property of an object having a definite position in time and space. As Deleuze observed, highlighting Carroll’s ludic obsession with logic, the sense of scale is a paradox of pure becoming: “Hence the reversals which constitute Alice’s adventures: the reversal of becoming larger and smaller—'which way, which way’ asks Alice, sensing that it is always in both directions at the same time, so that for once she stays the same, through an optical illusion.” Viewed in this light, Albuquerque’s recent works in the exhibition partake in the paradoxes of metamorphosis, most poignantly in leafy appendages that sprout from delicate fingertips (Fallen Limb, 2023; Reliquary with Hive, 2024). Like Bernini’s Daphne, that marmoreal masterpiece of vegetable, thwarted desire, Albuquerque demonstrates how the secret interiority of the body manifests as sculptural events at the very surface of things. With Therrien, Albuquerque has found herself an ideal co-conspirator in the sculptural language of desire that is incessantly in search of its subject, forever shaping the contours of a “figure-ground play” that hovers in the space between sense and signification.