In Pinturas Del Fin Del Mundo, Patricia Iglesias’s first solo exhibition at Sears-Peyton Gallery, an installation of recent oil paintings and accretive ceramic sculptures create a charged, yet muted landscape — like ruptured, volcanic earth. With “paintings of the end of the world” apocalyptic visions born from the recognition and residue of personal and political anxiety manifest into tremulous abstracted masses of color and form.
In El Recuerdo (The Memory), an oil painting over five feet across, dimmed mauve-pink and faded coral passages contort around steely grays and a patch of sandy orange. Along the painting’s lower edge, a crescendo of magenta expands toward the painting’s rightmost edge, intruding into the sea-green above. The thin contour lines that emerge and dissolve between the brushy pastel-colored shapes suggest the jumbled limbs of bodies.
Iglesias’s ceramic works consider scenes from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Apprenticed as a teenager in Argentina to the ceramicist Pablo Edelstein, Iglesias’s pinched-clay forms mount in baroque, almost barnacle-encrusted surfaces. Surrounded by the paintings, the sculptures become topographic extensions of Iglesias’s seething psychological universe.