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Dangling on the middle of Esther Gatón’s exhibition “Emil Lime” is a life-size boat, suspended by wire cables from a gap within the ceiling. The 2023 sculpture, which shares the present’s palindromic title, consists of sure bamboo reeds woven by means of a big brushed-metal hull and embellished with paint, glitter, stickers, and rubber animal toys. A Technicolor swath of “vegan bioplastic,” singed with a lighter and dyed with pure pigments evoking moss, mould, lichen, and fungi, hangs from the midsection like a downed and tattered mainsail. Hidden within the ceiling, a small motor causes the ship to periodically lurch and shudder, as if operating aground.
The wall textual content compares the boat’s motion with that of a mechanical bull, a gondola, or a pendulum—but none of those fairly match the meek, sputtering pathos of Gatón’s motorized dinghy. Its motion is extra like that of a glitch or a video-rendering error. That deliberate confusion of the true and digital extends to a collection of 4 untitled collages (all 2022) held on the encircling partitions. These small, chaotic compositions mix and blur photographic and digitally rendered materials (avenue snapshots, watermarked Net photographs, work-in-progress images from Gatón’s studio) to type primordial research of texture: glistening glass, oozing slime, roiling magma.
With its pastel-infused Waterworld aesthetic, and the attendant implications of a makeshift ark, “Emil Lime” drifts towards a way of looming apocalypse. However there’s a playfulness and an unironic curiosity in Gatón’s work that appears bent on reworking errant junk right into a life raft, nevertheless scrappy or unfit for the flood.
— Ren Ebel
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