The Brooklyn Rail

“I always say that all the earth that’s used in a sculpture of mine has to pass through my hands, so that the sculpture can be brought into existence, and so that the viewers feel what I want them to feel.”
–Delcy Morelos (b. 1967, Tierralta, Colombia)

“I don’t want my works to be touched, we’ve touched too much already.”
–Ettore Spalletti (b. 1940–d. 2019 Cappelle sul Tavo, Italy)

In Ettore Spalletti’s Carte Rosa (1998), twin panels, pale pink on both sides and nearly eight feet tall, form an unframed square. They are not flush with the wall. Air has worked its way beneath one of the panels, ballooning its lower edge so that it is like a curtain giving way to wind from an imagined window. Compositionally energized by the shadow of its central breach, the diptych’s hue cannot be contained by any one dimension or perspective, simultaneously absorbing pink and pushing it outwards. To achieve this abyss of color, Spalletti would mix and apply an impasto to his artworks each day, at the same time, sometimes for weeks in his immaculate studio in Cappelle sul Tavo on the Adriatic Sea. Vital to the artist’s meditative process was its final step, during which Spalletti would wear down each work’s layers, arriving at its ultimate color and form. In this moment of removal, of his own touch and of time’s, Spalletti met his artworks. Their circulation around the world for exhibitions—to other contexts, sources of light, and weathers—has kept this moment of discovery alive. It is shared, even now, five years after Spalletti’s death, as Carte Rosa peers into the North Gallery of Marian Goodman in New York as part of Esa Esquina Soy Yo: “That Corner is Me.”

Encircling Spalletti’s rosy diptych are a dozen single, double, and triple-part compositions by Colombian artist Delcy Morelos that combine, diverge, and lean across the lower half of the north gallery’s remaining three walls, a rhythm of geometries. A deep crimson, eleven of the works feature gridded cotton threads that are stretched on frames and then coated with a melange of clay, brick dust, and acrylic binder. Where the artist’s mixture hasn’t sunk into its mesh surfaces, corners crackle and clustered openings create interior and exterior worlds, invoking squares of light peering out from architecture cloaked by an urban night, or the uncapped cells of a beehive. In the twelfth work, linen drapes freely over a wood support, pouring out toward the gallery’s floor and coated to such a degree that it appears more like leather or plastic. Throughout, the artist’s red invokes the body’s blood currents, or the accretion of a warm, humid ground. It is this “or”—its fluidity and possibility—that stirs Morelos’s considered environment into forward motion. The artist engages viewers, amid the verticality of Manhattan’s 57th Street, with a retrieved history of the body and the room that is reverent to mother earth, a feminine deity in ancestral Andean traditions.

The result of an attentive correspondence between Delcy Morelos and Spalletti’s spouse, architect Patrizia Leonelli-Spalletti, Esa Esquina Soy Yo brings together two brilliant artists as they reach for the sacred, drawing from distinct lived histories. Where they meet, they tell a story to the viewer, whose body, memory, and gaze are central to this exhibition. While staring out into Spalletti’s sea of color or shifting around Morelos’s shin-height mountain range of chipboard, a narrative takes shape from their labors: his weeks of adding, then erasing a regimented recipe of parts towards a whole; her stirs, layers, folds, and drapes, a pulsating life force. Walking around the gallery, the works convey each artist’s attention to space, to emptiness as much as abundance. Their shared commitment to the spiritual quality of making and experiencing a work of art is palpable, as well as the power of their alchemies of the earth’s minerals—Spalletti’s impastos of color and Morelos’s mixtures of clay and brick dust. Like a good conversation, Esa Esquina Soy Yo twists and turns through the minds of its central builders, to ceaselessly illuminating effect.

Often, the show successfully harnesses the shape of one artist’s work to reveal more about the other’s. In the north viewing room, Spalletti’s Colonna, portacipria (2016) elevates a pale pink onyx disc atop a pristine white marble column, a prompt to look and move in the round, as the artist sometimes worked. Positioned over four feet in the air, high enough for the eyes of many viewers, Colonna invites a long glance into the churning pinks of the onyx’s center, the viewer’s circulation a marker of passing time. On the opposite wall, three artworks from Morelos’s series La doble negación (2008) drip like stalactites, acrylic on a threaded web. A closer look at their sides reveals a network of accumulated past lives, and markers of Morelos’s time. While the acrylic is still warm and moldable, Morelos bends the gridded, gravity-pulled thread into rectangular formations. Finite folds give way to infinite, cavernous facades, whose rows of drippy teeth look like flattened baskets across their surfaces. There is an interplay in this work between parts and the whole that, when directed back towards Colonna, accentuates the onyx’s powdery core, a collection of particles giving warmth to the smooth stone’s heart.

In the exhibition’s south gallery, windows cast bright slants of external weather beside Morelos’s Eva floor sculptures. Parallel red rivers of built-up, encrusted jute and a radiant range of jagged chipboard landforms recall her early life beside the Sinú River, among the Andes. From the central wall above, Spalletti’s sprawling impasto Senza titolo, azzurro (1990) brims with a blue reminiscent of his childhood, the walks along the Pescara coast during which he’d admire an invisible seam of sea and sky. Instilled with veneration, each of these pieces took shape as a retrospect of these childhoods, amid the hardening and hastening realities of industrial transformation. Morelos has spoken about the pain of the violent destruction of the Sinú river in service of hydroelectric power. Many writers and curators have described the manner with which Spalletti cultivated a controlled ecosystem for his work that separated, and perhaps protected, him from an increasingly fast-moving urban fabric. In their contemporary context, the artworks in this gallery recuperate and convey a lost, bestowed knowledge of our planet. Evidence of attention, they invite it like a charge, listening as much as they communicate.

Esa Esquina So Yo prompts the question: What does it mean to be a corner? What humanity can be felt from the two sides of a fold, the degrees of an angle, or the convergence of edges towards a central horizon? Arriving in parallel with magnificent and immersive solo installations at other venues in New York—Morelos at Dia: Chelsea and Spalletti at Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring—this carefully curated return to pivotal moments in their practices offers a fresh, layered context in which to consider each artist’s achievements and fascinations, in relation to one another. The space between them teems with curious insights. The effect is of an iterative inheritance: Two minds uniquely framing their surroundings and pasts, leaving gifts for the future.