The exhibition “Monotypes on copper and paper” by Cristina Iglesias is an extension of Hondalea (Sea Abyss), 2021, a site-specific public artwork in Spain for which the artist retrofitted an abandoned lighthouse off the coast of San Sebastian with a cast bronze cavern, hydraulic machinery and 26,715 cubic meters of bubbling water. Each a unique evocation of the rock sculpting the ocean, Iglesias’ etchings collectively help to detach hondalea from its remote physical location by introducing new perspectives, materials and processes.
Sharing an Arte Povera sensibility with the sculptures of trees and branches in bronze by Giuseppe Penone, the prints of Iglesias on copper…Cave Study II, VIIAnd XIV, all 2022 – honoring the transience of nature with materials that are, conversely, strong and stable. The three “Cave Studies” are copper plates which have been screen printed with images of a wax model of hondalea then treated locally with acid. The mint green and turquoise splashes and rivulets created by the acid resemble sea erosion, both in the imagery they create and in the corrosive process by which they were created. The fact that these compositions read like water crashing against rocks at multiple scales recalls the universality of Iglesias’ subject matter – they could just as easily be a satellite image of a mountain river as a large shot of a pond.
Five works from the “Hondalea Study” series, 2021, evoke two-dimensional aquatic depths. Painting on top of lithographs made from aerial photographs of hondalea, the artist added scrolls of translucent blue or green intaglio. The layered inks read like swirls but are also reminiscent of Jasper Johns’ targets (especially the more fluid ink-on-plastic iterations.) Similar to how Tacita Dean’s 2013 film, JJ—a tribute to Robert Smithson spiral jetty—detaches a Land art icon from time and space, Iglesias’ monotypes provide unexpected formal and conceptual associations that help hondalea transcend its site specificity to be experienced from entirely new perspectives, both geological and art historical.
