ART-PRESENTATION: Delia Gonzalez-The Last Days of Pompeii
The Cuban-American Delia Gonzalez is a multidisciplinary artist who recently moved to Athens, Greece, from New York. She works in drawing, sculpture, film, dance, and performance also as a musician, she has released records via the independent label DFA, including “Horse Follows Darkness”, a mesmerizing collection of electronically inclined songs of ambient and rhythmic persuasions from 2017.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galleria Fonti Archive
Delia Gonzalez draws inspiration from a broad range of sources including the history of the cinema, surrealism, Greek mythology, and different mystical traditions. Pompeii’s dramatic demise under the ashes of erupting Mount Vesuvius in has long occupied the popular imagination. In her most recent body of work, “The Last Days of Pompeii” (2017) that is on presentation at MIT List Visual Arts Center, the fate of the ancient Roman city serves as vehicle for a fantastical reflection on apocalyptic destruction and cyclical renewal, all conceived against the backdrop of the contemporary political landscapes of the United States and Greece. Gonzalez’s project shares its title (spelled out in a neon sculpture) with a 1926 Italian silent movie, “Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei”. The film was directed by Carmine Gallone and Amleto Palermi based on the novel “The Last Days of Pompeii” (1834) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Original release prints of the film were entirely colorized by the Pathechrome stencil color process. This production was one of the most expensive films at the time and exemplified the industry’s efforts to restore Italian cinema’s former dominance as it had waned vis-à-vis Hollywood, a subtle allusion that further underlines Gonzalez’s preoccupation with decline. The sculpture “The Last Days of Pompeii” (2017) it’s spelled out in a pink neon sign installed above the entrance door, which infuses the gallery’s main room with a crimson glow that is reflected in two monumental gates “The Osiris Gate I & II” (2017), while the pulsing electronic track “Vesuvius” (2017) sounds through the space, so that the white cube of the gallery becomes reminiscent of a set or stage. At the center of the exhibition are six recent works on paper in acrylic paint and pencil, which feature a series of recurring circles, or full moons. “The Hour of Departure”, “The N° Five”, “Duelle (Leni), Jupiter”, “The Flowering of the Crone”, “Conjurer” and “Don’t Exclude the Moon” (all 2017), mimicking geometric marble mosaics with illusionistic perfection, by means of graphite, acrylic, and golden leaf. Their recursive circular motif alludes to the moon and Isis as lunar goddess. While the history of Pompeii to Gonzalez is emblematic of contemporary societies’ vulnerability to ecological, economic, and political disaster, the marble and the moons in these works by contrast stand for permanence and rebirth, and denote a tenuous sense of optimism in the face of catastrophe. Currently based in Athens, the artist describes her album “Horse Follows Darkness” as “a soundtrack for a Western movie,” because, after moving back to New York from Berlin with her son, she thought “America felt like the Wild West”. Hence her return to Europe and its post-ancient South. For her move from New York to Athens the artist says “And now finally in Athens, I feel with absolute certainty Plato’s truth: obsessed by our shadows, hypnotized by the dangling, flaming, somewhat feeble reflection of our egos, we lost touch with reality, and matter. The swift remembrance of György Kepes’s words crosses my mind, suddenly, like the perception of manifold existences I might have, or might not have, lived”. In conjunction with the exhibition Delia Gonzalez will perform with Bryce Hackford for an evening of enchanting sounds and hypnotic electronic beats on 4/9/18. This performance will feature music from her album “Horse Follows Darkness” (November 2017).
Info: Curator: Henriette Huldisch, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames Street, Building E15, Cambridge, Duration: 31/7-30/9/18, Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 12:00-18:00, Thu 12:00-20:00, https://listart.mit.edu
