Sergio Suárez’s “Traces of an Unseen Fireplace” confronts preconceived notions by way of an immersive set up at MOCAGA. (Photographs by Montenez Lowery)
It was scorching after I walked in. It wasn’t simply the summer season warmth making my shirt stick with my again, however the gallery’s pink lights and pink partitions, paired with unidentifiable noises rising louder and louder, that primed me for discomfort. It felt like entering into the mouth of one thing primal. I felt myself begin to sweat, although perhaps that was anticipation or projection.
Traces of an Unseen Fireplace, Sergio Suárez’s solo exhibition on the Museum of Modern Artwork of Georgia (MOCAGA), is introduced together with their 2024/2025 Working Artist Mission. The exhibition combines sculpture, ceramics, and carved aid to construct a fictional but spiritually resonant mythos, an excavation web site that blurs the strains between time, reverence, and ritual. This present rewards the curious, leads fast conclusions to useless ends, and leaves those that select to marvel at his craftsmanship greater than glad.
I entered the exhibition carrying my very own cultural baggage: pink as hell, white as heaven. These binaries felt helpful till they didn’t. The pink bristled with symbols, however none of them fairly landed the place Western eyes may anticipate. Damaged pink clay tablets, put collectively in grids, had been reassembled and never “restored.” The works converse in fragments – some symbols are sharp and declarative, others blurry and stubbornly illegible till your second or third cross. Smoke is rendered as texture. Out of juvenile behavior, I yearned to the touch it as if my fingers may perceive greater than my eyes.
However it wasn’t all pink inside Traces of an Unseen Fireplace. Close to the doorway, spotlit within the white gentle of the latter half, is a retelling of Prometheus. Within the work, hearth cascades from the sky like a waterfall and is greeted by a bunch of figures; people, deities, or perhaps one thing in-between. Their limbs are dismembered but useful, their heads dislodged and spherical; some reflective, others as black because the slab that holds them.
Right here, I paused. If hearth is a present, divine, falling from above, then what is that this pink room I’m in? What assumptions do I carry with me? I entered considering that pink meant hell and white meant heaven – or no less than some secular cousin of fine and evil – however this primary piece which mirrors Prometheus’ story dared me to withstand projection. The primary of my obsessions is subtly depicted within the background the place a twin trapezoidal determine lies dormant.
In the midst of this pink portion of the ground was a reflective ceramics grid, every sq. composed of ripples. It initially appeared as an oasis from the summer season warmth, however the ripple kinds don’t cease at water.
Shifting deeper into the red-lit house I encountered a sculpture formed like an ōllamaliztli purpose put in overhead. The Mesoamerican ball sport was each a sport and a ritual of life and dying, and right here Suárez sculpted it as hearth. But on the ground round it lay acquainted companions – various rocks, fiery kinds, and people similar haunting spheres that populate the gallery ground and mimic installations underneath different items. Spherical heads matching the our bodies within the carvings relaxation beneath hanging items, as in the event that they had been disconnected skeletal stays. Or maybe they had been balls used within the sacred sport?
Towards the again of the exhibition, I encountered a white-lit part; an area that originally reads as a aid. However that, too, is a entice. Within the white half issues turn out to be extra articulate and detailed, but additionally extra brutal. Darker in tone than I’ve seen from Suárez’s earlier work, giant black and white carvings depict grand scenes of wrestle, ache, and rebirth.
Right here, gentle reads not as a temper however as a metaphor. I understood then that pink didn’t imply dangerous, white didn’t imply protected. These colours weren’t symbols for me to decode and obsess over like I did earlier than however somewhat formed an setting to navigate. After all Suárez wasn’t presenting binaries. By now, I’d begun to consider another which means for the ripples, as soon as considered salvation, sit like residue – impressions. Probably not solely rain within the desert however as a substitute the mark left behind after one thing divine handed by way of. It was a footprint.
Nonetheless, even amid the gravity of Suárez’s sculptural language I discovered myself wishing for a shift – not in formal rigor, which is simple – however in how the set up prolonged that language. The repetition of heads, rocks with clean intrusions as if the divine rested their heads there and sculptures of fireside created a visible chant; one which was simply be missed. With how typically and equally they had been introduced these ground groupings flattened themselves. My thoughts passed over them and their significance was ignored.
In his work, Suárez makes use of tangible objects to floor mythos in actuality. When the identical or comparable constellation of kinds seems beneath the works, the gesture begins to really feel much less grand and extra akin to a placeholder.
Arguably my favourite piece within the present options the fire-born ōllamaliztli purpose mounted on the wall. This piece just isn’t one thing “discovered” like the opposite artifacts, however positioned as if it had at all times been there. I paused at this piece the longest, not due to its scale however due to what it represented. This image is so charged with Mesoamerican cultural and historic weight that I questioned its inclusion.
With Suárez creating so many alternative symbols and icons of his personal, inventing his personal language, I used to be left questioning – why this? Why now? Within the works, he created a whole mythos of his personal with iconography that’s each historical and futuristic, after which centered a logo with a deep, historic real-world lineage. It was loaded.
If this physique of labor is a reenactment of archeological findings, because it appears to be, and if certainly Suárez is excavating a previous that by no means was, then the ōllamaliztli purpose introduces a selected realness that the remainder of the work avoids naming. This made me surprise what it means to undertake the aura of a cultural artifact with out anchoring it inside a wider archaeological context.
Suárez, with clear intent, has created a superbly advanced, unambiguous language that ceaselessly folds in on itself – revealing extra of itself whereas additionally hiding its different hand. Enjoying with time and legibility the exhibition gives a possibility to exist between worlds, and embodies each discovery and the creation of formality. Right here, rituals aren’t meant to be solved – like warmth and stress, they’re meant, as a substitute, to be endured.
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Montenez Lowery is a multidisciplinary Black American artist working in Atlanta, GA. Using pinhole pictures to discover identification, cultural reminiscence, and the complexities of interpersonal relationships. Lowery is desirous about photographic materials and course of and the way they are often included to complement the themes he tackles. Lowery has earned a BFA in Pictures from the Ernest G. Welch Faculty of Artwork and Design at Georgia State College. He was awarded The Larry and Gwen Walker Award and shortlisted for the Sony World Pictures Awards Pupil Competitors.