The works of Sara Enrico (Turin, 1979) inhabit a border territory, made of pulsations, ambiguities and sensorial tensions that dialogue with the genealogies of Eccentric Abstraction, that challenge to the root of primary forms that informed Lucy Lippard’s reflections finding actuation in the first exhibition experience at Marilyn Fischbach Gallery in New York in 1966. To this sensory magma belong artists like Eva Hesse, Dorothea Tanning, Keith Sonnier, Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, in whose works boundaries dissolve generating «something more sensual and sensitive»[1]. Sara Enrico uses materials of different nature to construct objects that oscillate between body and artifice. They don’t imitate anything: they insinuate. They let folds, yieldings, tensions that recall the body emerge.
Sara Enrico, “RGB (skin)”, 2021, sublimation print on polyester, ph. Cristina Leoncini, courtesy Museo d’arte contemporanea di Termoli, Collezione MACTE, Termoli. The realization of RGB (skin) was made possible thanks to Cantica21. Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere, a joint initiative of the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAECI-DGSP/MiC-DGCC, 2020)
It is here that the kinship with Eva Hesse, Dorothea Tanning and Louise Bourgeois becomes clear: the same sensorial ambiguity, the same capacity to destabilize the gaze. Enrico’s works don’t explain, don’t reassure: they push those who look at them to that exact point where matter ceases to be object and begins to become presence. What happens when the laws of nature seem to be subverted? When the material bends to its opposite, when the hard becomes soft, when the light suddenly takes on weight? As Milan Kundera wrote, the opposition between hard and soft is «the most mysterious and ambiguous of all oppositions[2]», while Lucy Lippard associated the soft with a slow eroticism, made of intimate, almost corporeal movements. The association of two opposite polarities opens to an alienating dimension. That process of constant transformation of elements spoken of first by Heraclitus, then Jung. What exists, mutating into its opposite, generates a sense of latent morbidity that alters harmony. Yet, it is the most natural thing there is. It is therefore nature itself that disturbs us, that possibility of being everything and its opposite, of abandoning one skin to inhabit another. It is this continuous movement that makes us participants in the most obscure and vital mystery of life. Between two opposite dimensions a shadow zone is often created, something that resides in the middle, in which that disarming tension coagulates..
Sara Enrico, “Cut Out”, 2017, polyurethane, pigment, fake nails, ph. Danilo Donzelli, courtesy the artist and Galleria Tiziana Di Caro
The objects created in fabric by Sara Enrico move on this material tension, which transcends realistic representation to privilege pure sensorial experience. These are surfaces that deceive perception, where canvases impregnated with plaster coexist with dry foam rubber forms with sharp profiles. This game of evocations pushes to always know more: we find ourselves circling around these strange objects, we need to consume their surface with our gaze. This material density is not only an epidermal fact, but is also conceptual. The artist invades the space in which the body generally dwells, investigating the micro-variations that define its postures and settlements, the inclinations of the limbs that reveal energy or quiet. Her sculptures seem to preserve traces of a fragmented or absent body, sleepy or suddenly alert. Each surface tells of a contact, a suspended movement, a gesture in the act of being accomplished. The objects thus become sensorial envelopes: forms that speak of the body without showing it, suggesting its presence through perceptible imprints and tensions. And it is precisely here that the most subtle quality of the artist’s production resides. The latent sensuality is not born so much from the form itself, as from what happens within it; passages of state, oscillation between incongruous polarities, from the coexistence between full and empty, rigidity and yielding, expansion and contraction. For Adam Budak, chief curator of the National Gallery of Prague, matter in her works is never inert, but constructs an erotic gestalt, a perceptual configuration dense with friction: surfaces that stretch, yield, collapse; forms that seem to breathe or hold back an impulse. Her works deceive perception to show that ambiguity is a natural fact and that precisely from this conflict is born a form of primary and visceral sensuality.
Sara Enrico, “The Jumpsuit Theme”, installation view, 2019, cement and pigments, ph. Alessandro Nassiri, courtesy Mart, Archivio fotografico e Mediateca
The citation is not direct but it is an undeniable affinity. The Jumpsuit Theme by Enrico enters into resonance with the arched and twisting bodies, oscillating between contraction and expansion conceived by Louise Bourgeois. A legacy that returns in Cut Out (2017) by Sara Enrico, an object in painted polyurethane endowed with almost organic propagations, suspended on the wall like the papier mâché of Several by Hesse, which enclosed a rubber soul. Sara Enrico takes up the grammar with surprising lucidity. Today as then, artists continue to investigate the posture of the body and the way in which it inhabits space through sophisticated media.
Valerie Caputo
[1] Lucy R. Lippard, “Landmark Exhibitions Issue. Curating by Numbers”, Tate Papers, issue 12, 2009, p.1.
[2] M. Kundera, “L’insostenibile leggerezza dell’essere”, 1984, tr. it. G. Dierna, Milano, Adelphi, 2024, pp. 15-16.
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