The Brooklyn Rail

Familiarity breeds contempt? Yes, indeed. I remember the first iPhone, back in 2007—how sleek and undeniable, how truly and authentically modern and revelatory the rounded corners of its chunky icons and the pristine white plastic of its charging cord felt in the BlackBerry-coded vision of the early aughts. I can only imagine what Bakelite must have looked like to the early-twentieth-century eyes acculturated to the wood and metal of the pre–mass-manufacturing era’s perceptual sphere—or how American cereal boxes must have struck my Soviet-raised parents’ optic nerve upon first encounter.

Fast forward to 2025: who among us wouldn’t be hard-pressed to think of anything more visually loathsome than the disposable normative sheen of the primary-colored plastic and the cheap polished aluminum that has gradually choked every visible corner of daily life, in and outside the home? That’s where the pictorial succulence of June Crespo’s signature industrial materials finds us: longing for the ASMR tactility of raw concrete and the radical elegance of unpolished steel. It’s a paradox born of the BPA era that the crudest and most industrial of materials nowadays communicate to our collective “Period Eye” (the term famously used by Michael Baxandall to describe the true nature of vision and aesthetic appreciation as not only physically determined, but also socially and culturally conditioned by a viewing subject’s historical situation and background) sophistication and artistry far more than any of their hyper-processed derivatives.

Crespo’s latest show at Galería Ehrhardt Flórez comes in the form of four pairs of materially and aesthetically twinned pieces. Of those, two, The dancing column (I) (all works 2025) and The dancing column (II), took the shape of asymmetrical, quasi-biomorphic pillars of raw concrete. They rested in the first gallery propped up, skewered, and buttressed by the scaffolding constructions of steel pipes, pillows, foam slabs, heavy-duty straps, and errant loops of worn tracksuit pants. Alternatingly scaly in some spots—in the raw, quasi-porous form of untreated concrete—and smoothed into ridged planes in others, the two sculptures cloak the prosaic industry of their primary medium in a suggestive air of something simultaneously medical and vegetal, as cued up by the juxtaposition of bolster pillows and the crutched configuration of the tree-like, branching steel armature of its core element. By contrast, The dancing column (Iris I) and The dancing column (Iris II) focalized the patinated steel casting of their respectively analogous largest components: the crudely carved, jagged-edged oblong carcasses stuffed and threaded through with lengths of fabric, slings, and chains, like flower buds ready to bloom or larval cocoons on the edge of transformation.

It’s a trite yet perennially true observation that the key affordance of the sculptural medium is its demand for an ambulatory mode of viewership. Its existence as a three-dimensional object demands a spectator’s preemptive acceptance of a work as multipolar and constantly unfolding in successive views while lacking any one definitively primary “face.” This reminder would lead us to another aesthetic exhaustion of the modern era that renders Crespo’s counteraction of it especially edifying: the ubiquitously tiresome frontality of viewpoint characteristic of the digital screen’s array of icons on an impenetrably flat surface (as well as much of contemporary art making). The show’s two non-columnar pairs of works spoke to that aspect more pointedly. TW,TG (I) and TW,TG (II), placed in two separate galleries, concealed the entirety of their respective housing rooms’ longest walls behind a dirty safety-orange (TW,TG (I)) and a semi-transparent white (TW,TG(II)) screen constructed from ventilation pipes, truck tarpaulin, fiberglass fabric, and epoxy resin. Slightly curved in the middle, both panel pieces feature multiple openings across their frontal planes, each leading inside the unseen depth of a concealed ventilation pipe sequestered behind the surface—a viscerally allegorical cancellation of the exhausting depthlessness of a flatscreen.

Cy (II) and Cy (III) messed with frontality in a different way. Both of the works take the shape of basketball hoops, flipped sideways and ironed flat so that their nets extend and adhere flatly to the supporting wall, instead of dropping underneath the circular openings, overlaying the hoops’ attachments. The Cys’ outer ridges are each flourished with a single bronze flower, their stems perfectly perpendicular to the wall, which further exacerbates the confusion of perspectival planes within the disunified view of the sculpture’s flipped subject. That mash-up of elements—as well as their uneasy reciprocity with the supporting wall as much as with each other—speaks to what seems with increasing consistency to be a specific trend among millennial artists of highlighting, amplifying, and making focally central the interdependence of parts and the elegant choreography of sub-tension born therein. Perhaps it is reflective of our own increasingly acute awareness of the raw and unedited global interdependence we’re all imbricated in—despite what the polished atomicity of our phones may insistently try to make us believe in. And that’s novel enough for now.