The Fourth State of Matter: A Conversation with Gisela Colón
Site-specific installation at Desert X, AlUla, Saudi Arabia, The Future is Now (25 Foot Parabolic Monolith Iridium), 2020, Engineered aerospace carbon fiber, 300 x 96 x 120 in., Image credit: Lance Gerber Studio.
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“…abstraction has always been a vehicle to contain the personal and the private, the unutterable…a place where all the complex liminal narratives can safely live…”
–Teresita Fernández¹
There’s a perfectionism to the abstract, minimalist sculptural works of Los Angeles-based artist Gisela Colón that can be initially deceiving—a sort of armor that seems impenetrable, but whose insides hold layers of complexity that deserve more attention beyond their seductive surfaces. And while Colón’s works draw heavily from the philosophical foundations of Minimalism and, more specifically, its Southern California cousin, Light and Space, it’s important to recognize how these aesthetic affiliations often erase or bypass the inherent connections between Colón’s work and her Diasporican identity. To remedy these ossified and limiting labels, Colón has coined the term Organic Minimalism to conceptually ground her practice. Materials like aerospace carbon fiber and optical acrylic films are transformed into what she describes as “…a reductive vocabulary of forms that embody organic life-like qualities of energy, movement, change, growth, transformation, evolution, gravity, and time…becoming conduits of transmutation, transformation, and enlightenment.” In the conversation that follows, thanks to the generous invitation of gallerist Efraín López,² Teréz Iacovino sat down with Gisela Colón over Zoom, just days before Mother’s Day, to discuss how her work challenges, deconstructs, and expands the language of abstraction, while creating space for women, Latinx, and underrepresented peoples to see themselves reflected in that language.
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Teréz Iacovino (TI): You describe yourself as a self-taught late bloomer as you transitioned to a full-time studio practice in your late 30s. Prior to this transition you practiced law, but always maintained a painting practice. What were some of the foundational influences that led to each of these paths—one foot in the legal system and one foot in art?
Gisela Colón (GC): My first foray into creating art was actually my childhood in Puerto Rico. My mother was an amateur painter and she taught me how to paint from a very young age—I painted oil on canvas and wood, landscapes, still-lives, sugar cane fields, guiros y maracas, potted plants, everything around us. I also sculpted with clay and even created an immersive painted room at my grandmother’s house when I was ten. My youth in Puerto Rico was also marred by gun violence in many forms, so subconsciously I gravitated towards more rational forms of studies such as economics and law as a method of self-preservation. As a young girl who had experienced physical violence and even femicide—my uncle murdered his wife in front of my cousins—and at the age of 12 I also lost my mother—I felt law could protect me in some subconscious way. Knowledge became a form of self-empowerment against a male-dominated societal system. During the decade I worked in the legal field, I continued to create art almost as a visceral impulse. I always had to create—there was no other choice!
The turning point that marked when I decided to go professional was the birth of my two sons in 2002 and 2003, which triggered in me a deep personal transformation. Giving life to other humans awakened biological knowledge of the act of creation as a force of nature. Our bodies channel the history of our time on earth, and the act of birthing to new life revived ancestral genetic codes of modes of being. I felt that I was triggered back into survival defense mechanisms. At that time, I was processing primal emotions such as anger, suffering, violence, abandonment, death, displacement, and oppression, which in turn led to more visceral, intuitive ways of painting. I decided to employ large metal spatulas to slice paint, echoing the palette knives I had used as a child. Applying an intuitive technique of layering and crosshatching, I created fragmented abstractions that looked like surreal abstracted landscapes. This full-bodied, aggressive process of slicing and carving paint became a cathartic exercise that channeled intense bursts of repressed and unprocessed emotions.
L: Colón at the age of four with her rooster in Puerto Rico; R: La Finca (The Farm), 1977, Oil on wood panel, 48 x 36 in.; Made in collaboration at the age of 11 with her mother, the painting depicts “el campo”—the rural area in Bayamón where Colón grew up in the mid-1970s, which embodies the natural and supernatural worlds that permeated Colón’s psyche during her youth.
Sueño del Yunque, 2005, oil on wood, 40 x 72 x 1.5 in.; Colón’s paintings from the 1990s and 2000s foreshadow key aspects of her sculptural practice today, such as the use of light, energy, fluid color, and organic forms derived from nature.
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TI: As a mother, I can deeply relate to the act of birth as a catalyst for transformation. While painting provided you with the initial outlet to work through repressed and unprocessed emotions, sculpture would eventually take its place. How did you transition between these mediums? How did this transition lead you to connect with the Los Angeles Light and Space artists?
GC: I was going through an autodidactic process of absorbing the histories of art that I gravitated to, such as Minimalism, Light and Space, and Land Art. I was reading seminal writings by Robert Irwin, Donald Judd, etc. and also traveling to important land and environmental art icons by Michael Heizer, Judd’s Chinati, Robert Smithson’s Non-sites. Simultaneously, around this time, I was introduced to De Wain Valentine through a mutual friend, and through him, I met other key artists of that generation like Larry Bell, Peter Alexander, Mary Corse, and Helen Pashgian. The immersion into this historic group, along with my studies and “pilgrimatic” travel experiences, generated a shift in my thinking, leading me to move from painting into sculpture. It was sort of a subversive challenge to tackle this mostly white, male legacy of West Coast art, and I said to myself: “maybe I can use my Puerto Rican perspective to break open this canon and create something new.”
My first series of organic sculptures utilizing acrylic materials consisted of painted armatures. I kept on pushing to “shed the paint,” and my experiments with optical acrylics lead to the discovery of my current mature work which operates without paint—my sculptures act like prismatic structures which reflect and refract light, creating a “fluid color spectrum,” in real time, that generates a range of perceptual possibilities connecting the viewer to primal sources of life force and cosmological energy. They are like vessels containing life.
Installation view, “Something Beautiful: Reframing La Colección,” on view May 19, 2022 through March 10, 2023 at El Museo del Barrio, New York. Courtesy El Museo del Barrio, New York/Photography On White Wall. Colón’s Hyper Ellipsoid (Infrared), 2021, Blow-molded acrylic, 90 x 42 x 12 in., is presented in the exhibition section Abstraccionistas, focusing on the protagonism of women in abstract art such as Carmen Herrera, Fanny Sanín, and Marta Chilindrón, amongst others.
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TI: When you began to break open this Light and Space cannon through the development of Organic Minimalism, you started to draw ties to concepts such as the Divine Feminine, the Cosmological realm, and Latinidad. You describe your sculptures as “simultaneously merging a futuristic space age aesthetic characteristic of Los Angeles, with organic life forces sourced from the Earth and beyond.” If we consider all these intersections at play, what other artists do you see yourself in conversation with?
GC: The concept of Divine Feminine goes back thousands of years and even starts with our planet being referred to as “mother earth.” Judy Chicago comes to mind as an original feminist, yet for me the term feminism can be somewhat limiting. I prefer to think of a much broader frame of reference where feminism is non-binary, gender fluid and even extends to planetary concerns. Being a feminist today, in my view, means that you embrace the planet as a whole, and maintain a non-anthropocentric viewpoint. Plants, animals, and all life on Earth are part of a whole ecosystem that gives life. From a Cosmic perspective, as humans we are located on a blue ball floating through space. I connect with other artistic practices that reference in some way this energy of constant movement, growth, and transformation, such as for example, Zilia Sánchez, whose organic sculptural works carry the feeling of biological parts; Olafur Eliasson who blends earth and cosmos in perceptual works; José Dávila whose industrialized sculptures merge artificial tension with natural elements; Alicja Kwade whose dynamic structures combine steel armatures with rocks and stones, presenting a similar balance between the man-made and the earthly; Jennie C. Jones whose abstract creations integrate sound into inert compositions also expanding the minimalist discourse; Paul Stephen Benjamin whose color-coded works rooted in minimal aesthetics become vessels of identity; and Gabriella Salazar whose architectural structures likewise are grounded in minimalism, yet are impregnated with hidden biotic substances like coffee. Some of these artists are Latine/x and some are not. Latinidad is one of the materias primas from which I draw creative energy, but it is not the only realm. Latinidad is the foundation of my identity and provides deep roots to my practice, yet in the end, I strive to create a universal language that is essentially human.
TI: Over the years, as you worked towards creating this universal language, we can see your monolithic sculptures have shifted to even greater and greater scale. As the complexity of your work requires many technical hands and lots of material problem solving, what does the process of collaboration like between you and your team?
Colón with her studio team in Los Angeles, CA.
GC: My process is very collaborative, and contrary to external appearance of my sculptures, my work is all very handmade, and my artist hand is present every step of the way. I have three different teams that I work with on the different bodies of work that I create. All of the members of my teams are of Latinx descent and hail from countries such as Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Colombia, and Ecuador, among others. I love that our teams are so diverse and come together to create work that goes out into the world that represents all of us. My teams are very excited when I do large-scale projects around the world, because we are all part of the journey together. As an undercurrent of the work, there is this conversation across national and cultural boundaries, where our Latinx voices sort of collectively carry around the world.
TI: When I think about your practice, I think about notions of deep time in relation to geologic processes and the formations of the most foundational naturally formed monolithic structures—mountains. When considering the process of how mountains come to be in nature, they involve periods of destruction, migration, and resettlement of materials, eventually leading to a metamorphosis or rebirth. If the act of making is also one of healing, how has your practice enabled you to heal and hold space for others who may share similar experiences?
GC: From the beginning, my painting practice, starting in my childhood, was a healing exercise for me. And as I was explaining a little bit earlier, it really transformed me in the early 2000s when I needed to channel all of that turbulent emotional energy that bubbled up after childbirth. It took me many decades to realize that the act of making was an act of healing for me, as well as others. When I first started creating my monoliths, I didn’t fully understand subconsciously what was happening. It took me a while to realize that the gun violence of my youth—for many years, I spent touching bullets, seeing firearms, experiencing them, causing death around me—was so painful that I had suppressed even the most basic ability to see that my monoliths resembled bullets. It took me a while to confront that bullets and projectiles were inside me. I always knew that they were like mountains, but I didn’t realize that at their core they were bullets transformed into mountains. So this literal act of transformation was also a metaphorical and poetic way of handling oppression, displacement, and violence, and then channeling it into a structure that resembled the mountains that gave me strength as a child. All around me, not only El Yunque rainforest, but other hills, valleys, peaks, and mountains in Puerto Rico, including the Cordillera Central, Puerto Rico’s geological backbone, had become internalized into my psyche as the providers of life and strength. In a sense, my practice has allowed me to personally heal, but also, I hope it holds space for others who can somehow connect or identify with primal experiences of owning one’s strength, of turning weaknesses and trauma into light and energy. Sometimes people want to hug and embrace my monoliths and I say: “yes, go ahead!”…somehow they can feel and sense the transformative energy inside them!
Quantum Shift (Parabolic Monolith Sirius Titanium), 2021, Engineered aerospace carbon fiber with dichroic particles, 7.62 X 2.4 X 3.048 meters, presented in DeOude Warande baroque forest, Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Reference image of El Yunque Rainforest. Colón’s Monolith sculptures derive from her experiences of Puerto Rico’s El Yunque Rainforest, and the Cordillera Central, the backbone of Puerto Rico’s geological formation. The bullets from the gun violence of her youth became transformed into enigmatic mountainous structures as a metaphorical and poetic way of handling oppression, displacement, violence, and death. Through these sculptures, Colón transmutes negative energy into vessels of healing, light, and life.
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TI: As we think about this transformative energy being emitted from your sculptures, transcendence is a term that comes up frequently for me, not only in how your sculptures surpass the limits of a material, but more so in relation to the experience you want to offer your viewer. In a past interview with fellow Diasporican artist Edra Soto, you shared that you “gravitate toward creating singular, reductive forms because they feel atavistic and serve apotropaic purposes.”³ Can you share more about your desire to return to something ancient or ancestral and what indigenous epistemologies you draw from within your practice?
GC: My practice has always been in a sense, syncretic, both literally and metaphorically because I merge different disciplines that range from scientific, more rational viewpoints (physics, chemistry, mathematics, minimalism) to metaphysical interpretations of the world (magical realism, ancestral memories passed down through the spoken word). My upbringing in Puerto Rico was a wonderful concoction of very dissimilar experiences that drew from a wide range of bodies of knowledge. On the more rational side was the influence of my father, a scientist and chemist, and on the other hand, my grandmother played a key role in developing my understanding of the invisible aspects of the world. A devout Catholic by day, by night she would resort to divine revelations, white magic, the tarot, and astrological readings. Many of these beliefs were sourced from Indigenous and African heritage in Puerto Rico. So early on in my life, I learned the wonders of seeking ancient memories and ancestral knowledge going back thousands of years. For example, as a child, when I would visit the Taíno ceremonial park in Utuado, I would run my fingers over the ancient petroglyphs, study the curvatures of the geological rocks dating back millennia, and could feel a connection to those humans that lived before us. The rocks would speak to me. I could feel our ancestor’s voices traveling through time. Also, as part of the school curriculum in Puerto Rico we studied the mythologies and beliefs of the native Taínos—the concepts of Cemís or gods connected to nature like, for example, Yukiyú, El Díos del la Montaña, etc. A lot of these ancestral concepts of connecting to Nature percolated into my consciousness early in life. My grandmother was also clairvoyant, and she predicted the death of her second son years before it happened. Through her, I also learned that time travel could be real. Then also I spent my teenage years absorbing Latin American literature, literary masters such as Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus, el novelista puertorriqueño René Marquez, poetas puertorriqueños como Luis Lloréns Torres, Luis Palés Matos, Julia de Burgos, y también absorbí muchas enseñanzas a través de la música de los 1970s de Roy Brown, José Feliciano, Danny Rivera, etc. Collectively, these experiences gave me a feeling of magical realism, of the unseen, invisible forces around us, a sense of strange possibilities. Over the years, I have applied this accumulated experiential knowledge to my practice. Through my sculptures, I try to convey a sense of primal semiotic messages. No words are needed sometimes for humans to feel a connection across cultures and time. We gravitate naturally towards atavistic things because deep down inside I think we are viscerally seeking to give meaning to our lives. Apotropaic means that we want to ward off evil spirits and ancient cultures had a much better grasp of these invisible forces around us. They had much deeper connections to the realm of the mystical. I think this era of high technology ironically has produced less actual instinctual knowledge. Humans need to go back to increased connections with our past, where we pay attention to ancestral memories and ancient biological knowledge.
TI: In thinking about unseen, invisible forces, your holographic and iridescent surfaces are always engaged in “active transformation,” as a result of light. As you so eloquently note, “Light is the ultimate color material.” Can you talk more about your relationship to light in regard to what you term as hotspots or source locations?
GC: Since I was a child growing up in Puerto Rico I listened to the earth and paid attention to what my body was telling me. I noticed that when found myself in nature I could feel a burst of energy coming into my body. When I was upset, I would run into nature and had the sensation of Earth channeling into my body, and this feeling would give me a sensation of solace. Nature became a place of refuge and calmness. When I moved to California, particularly when I spent time out in the desert, I could feel these hotspots—sort of vortexes of energy coming out of the earth that ripple through space, and I just attuned my mind and my body sensations to be able to perceive them and become aware of them. And as my artistic practice has taken me on journeys to other geological places around the world such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Cuba, Brazil, I have become more and more attuned to these planetary sources of energy. The Earth is an entire sphere of concentrated life force. The light is always fluctuating around us, and when you become attuned to the earth, then you experience light as an embodied phenomena that goes through your body. We are light. Waves and particles of light are all around us, and go through the earth in every direction, light goes through rocks, light is part of everything… so energy and light can be experienced as inextricably intertwined phenomena.
TI: Lastly, I want to touch on another turning point in your work that happened last year when you created a series of conceptual sculptures entitled Estructuras Totémicas (Totemic Structures). These works more intimately explored your Diasporican positionality through the layering of site-specific visual strata including pulverized bullets, red earth from Puerto Rico, desert sands of the West, and cosmic dust. Can you share how you came to create this piece and your desire to speak more directly to your own story through these specific materials?
GC: The interesting thing about the Estructuras Totémicas was that they sort of encapsulate my practice coming full circle. They integrate many disparate elements of my prior decades of being an artist. The carved layers of my paintings, my land art practice, my sculptural monolith practice, they are integrative of several aspects of my journey as an artist. The Estructuras themselves also tell my layered complicated story: starting foundationally with my childhood violence through the pulverized bullets, to then the healing red earth that sustained me in Puerto Rico, to the immigrant status when I arrived in California, to building a new future, these sculptures speak about personal illegibility as a Latinx artist and also represent my own identity of rebirth and transformation.
Estructura Totémica (Piedras Contra Balas, Aguas del Yunque), 2023, Monolith form composed of aurora particles, stardust, cosmic radiation, intergalactic matter, ionic waves, organic carbamate, gravity, and time, stacked upon bullet-resistant lucite base containing layered matter, from bottom to top: pulverized bullets, Puerto Rico red earth (fango Borinqueño), Western desert sands, cosmic dust, 87.5 x 9 x 9 inches; Colón’s Estructuras Totémicas are conceptual autobiographical time capsules containing matter sourced from the physical and liminal sites of the artist’s life.
These sculptures really speak to my experience as a Diasporican artist that is very far away from home in California. There are very few Puerto Ricans on the west coast. It was hard to somehow make sense of a life that has not been accepting of Latinx differences. Producing the sculptures was a cathartic exercise in bringing my full identity to the forefront. It is not easy being an artist of Latinx heritage in the United States. Mostly, we are invisible or illegible, to be accepted in the mainstream artworld our practices are supposed to fit into prescribed canonical boxes, so it was particularly cathartic to produce work that goes back to my beginnings and tells my story more fully and unapologetically. We are not readily classifiable. That is the dilemma—the predicament of the Latinx community is our “in-betweenness”—but also therein lies the wonder. I like to think of us (our Latinx identities) as “plasmatic”—a fourth state of matter created under superheated, intense pressure. Like “plasma,” we are born of deep oppression, becoming mountains bursting from geological forces beneath the earth, or supernovae exploding into space.
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Endnotes
¹ “On Thinking and Being Caribbean: A Roundtable Discussion.” Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today, ed. Carla Acevedo-Yates (Del Monico Books/Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2023), 7.
² Efraín López is the former director of Gavlak Gallery where he worked with Colón since 2020. The two became close colleagues as Diasporicans living in Los Angeles. López is founder of Efraín Lopez, a contemporary gallery in Tribeca, which opened its inaugural exhibition this past June.
³ Soto, Edra. “Gisela Colon and her Cosmic Creations.” Hispanic Executive. September 27, 2022. https://hispanicexecutive.com/gisela-colon-artist/.
Gisela Colón (b. 1966) is a Puerto Rican-American contemporary artist whose organic, totemic, light-activated sculptures and monumental environmental installations explore the subjectivities of human perception challenging viewers to experience transformation in real time and space. Drawing from her formative years in Puerto Rico, Colón pioneered a language of “organic minimalism” employing as source material the energy of the earth, ancestral biological memories, and concepts of time, gravity, and universal forces of nature. Colón’s Monoliths—tall, freestanding, cast carbon fiber forms—draw on Puerto Rico’s geological formations, the futuristic, and the mysteries of ancient cultural artifacts. Colón’s process of layering and stacking 21st century materials such as optical acrylics, carbon fiber, and strata of matter harvested from the geographical and liminal sites of her life, narrates her complex history as a diasporic Puerto Rican artist. Colón has exhibited internationally throughout the United States, Europe, Egypt, the Middle East, and Latin America. Her work belongs in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, El Museo del Barrio, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, amongst others.
Teréz Iacovino is an artist, educator, and curator based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her curatorial voice is continually shaped by the artists she works with, the students she mentors, and her experience as a Latina and First-Gen graduate working in academia. As the Assistant Curator of the University of Minnesota's Katherine E. Nash Gallery, Iacovino has worked with a wide variety of national and international organizations including the Estate of Ana Mendieta and Galerie Lelong, the National Council of Education on the Ceramic Arts, World of Matter Collective, and Women’s Studio Workshop among others. She is the recipient of a Fall 2021 Curatorial Research Fellowship Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and was recently selected to participate in the upcoming 2023 Voices in Contemporary Art Artist Interview Workshop. Within her curatorial research, Iacovino is currently investigating 21st century Puerto Rican artistic practices across Archipelagic and Diasporican perspectives in collaboration with San Juan based independent curator José López Serra.