Beacon, New York
Pablo Garcia Lopez is like a modern-day Bernini, sculpting baroque figures in cast natural silk, rather than marble, to create exquisite and contradictory sculptures. Exploiting the sensuousness of spun-silk, he sets that soft fleshiness against the sharp steel of surgical implements to shock and fascinate. In Wedding Cake with Pietà Topper, Garcia Lopez uses band-saw blades with upright teeth to define the five tiers of the “cake,” which is topped by Michelangelo’s well-known image of Mary holding the body of Christ. Set at the center of this familiar group, surrounded by the graceful flow of cast silk, the presence of a vaginal speculum is particularly disjunctive, giving rise to multiple associations. Punk studs, leather straps, and garter clips give the piece a sadomasochistic feel, playing Catholicism’s traditional negation of the body against the persistent search for the pleasure integral to the human condition. The entire piece is like an unexpected view into a hypothetical “life to come” after the wedding cake is cut…see the entire review in the print version of January/February’s Sculpture magazine.
