The Brooklyn Rail

Christian de Boschnek’s Essays on Fragility, in Art Cake’s Studio 10, stages fourteen medium-sized emulsion, encaustic, and gold leaf tableaux on glass. These are accompanied by a mixed media installation, By a Thread (2024), where, pocketed in one of the room’s corners, a suspended and enigmatic feathered creature droops towards a bowl of milkweed. De Boschnek’s glass tableaux are framed in raised porcelain skeletal structures inspired by Sol LeWitt’s 1979 Geometric Structures. Some works, like Emerging Fetish (2024), By a Thread (2024), and Paradise (2024) utilize figurative motifs. Emerging Fetish centers a pink-gray slivered brain hemisphere which sits atop a pool of semi-translucent amber emulsion and oil strokes, boxed along the axes of a penciled rhombus. By a Thread and Paradise figure the human silhouette in side profile, doubling it by way of cast shadows; in the former, the body is outlined in the artist’s characteristic tawny-flaxen palette and, in the latter, it is directly etched into the glass. Other works, like Molting (2024), which sets snakeskin within the truss of encaustic caramel casing, and Ascension (2024), where a rectangle patch of milkweed seeds is set behind an open matrix, make use of found natural objects.

Despite the diversity of material, however, all of the works emphasize pure form. Where the human figure, cerebrum motif, sinuous circuits of snakeskin, or milkweed threads are used, they are purposed for their form and not their referential significance. De Boschnek often delimits one or two forms on the glass surface, drawing or etching ringlets, linear threads, or geometric intaglio. More importantly, de Boschnek not only presents singular forms but doubles—and, often, triples—them through the dance of shadows. He culls the fragile and ever-infolding underside of glass, pooling glints and refractions along the bare wall through his raised surfaces, utilizing the frequently neglected plane that is the tableau’s soffit. The results are sometimes bulbous and planetary, elsewhere milky, and occasionally near-clear. The evocative shadows collide, trickle, thread, and coalesce, frequently bisected or framed by etched or yarn-lined vertices.

In Evolution/Devolution (2024), egg-white plastic sheeting, sculpted with a torch, is set atop the glass, adding a surface dimension. The cartilage structure resembles a condor-picked carcass, its annular folds gleaming like a bovine ribcage moldering in the sun. Towards the right, a coal-black trapezoid, painted in semi-diaphanous brushstrokes, is perched on its skewed side. Taking in the entirety of the alien form’s constituent parts, the viewer intuitively “reads” the form from left to right, the geometric additive element giving the structure a snub-nose finish.

De Boschnek’s works are some of the strongest contemporary art pieces I have recently seen. There are important art historical precedents to his use of synthetic materials, including László Moholy-Nagy’s early Galalith works, the first of which was produced in the 1920s, and his later “light modulators.” Works like Moholy-Nagy’s Space Modulator Experiment, Aluminium 5 (ca. 1931–35), which uses an incised transparent plastic disk and aluminum plate mounted on panel, and Construction (1935), utilizing pigmented Galalith on wooden panel, prompt the “doubling dance” of shadows along geometric parcels and linear enclosures. Formally, one might also be reminded of Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23), though the visual relations in Duchamp’s large glass are not purely formal but refer to a set of narrative ideas concerning scopophilia. In his emphasis on form, de Boschnek is more so heir to Moholy-Nagy than Duchamp, though unlike the Bauhaus artist, who placed panels beneath his Galalith and glass segments, de Boschnek sets his interplay of shadows along the direct undersurface of bare gallery walls.

With his amber emulsions, geometric parcels and their shadow repetitions, de Boschnek has made contact with what, in Art (1914), Clive Bell famously called “significant form.” For Bell, an artwork’s “significant form” is not reducible to any set of rules or concepts but is prompted by its formal relations—we can intuitively feel it as an aesthetic emotion when we see it. Bell writes that, “art transports us from the world of man’s activity to the world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests” and “the contemplation of pure form leads to a state of extraordinary exaltation and complete detachment from the concerns of life.” De-purposing natural materials and familiar silhouettes, de Boschnek’s work shows “significant form” to be, as Bell theorized it, intrinsically valuable (rather than purposive). De Boschnek pushes formal relations to the height of “aesthetic exaltation,” using the full breadth of pictorial language, including gestural brushwork, geometric enclosures, sculptural sheets, and, not least of all, the fair dance of shadows.