In late 2023, the largest retrospective of the artist Marisol began its journey at the first of four museums. Marisol (full name: Marisol Escobar) was a French-born Venezuelan artist who is associated with the Pop movement and best known for her larger-than-life wooden sculptures.
Marisol: A Retrospective is an expansive exploration of Marisol’s artistic eras: her earliest works in sculpture, her height of Pop sculpture, 2-D color pencil drawings, ocean inspired art, costume creation for dance companies, anticolonial solidarity and public monuments.
In his accompanying essay “You Will Not Catch Me Alive,” artist Alex Da Corte writes: “Two faces have I, one to laugh and one to cry. And for Marisol Escobar, through closed eyes and mouths cast in plaster, one to scream and one to shout and one to pierce the night.”
Corte’s words are apt: Marisol’s works pierce, present in my mind long after I left the museum. One thing that struck me throughout Marisol: A Retrospective was how sees. Marisol seemed to see in a way that cut right down to the core of an object or action, and she manages to recreate that perspective so transformatively. Perhaps part of this is how sculpture works in general. Sculpture is embodied physically in space and also cannot be seen fully; looking from different angles will yield a different result.
Marisol’s sculptures force you to look multiple times in multiple ways. Departing from realism, she uses the multiple faces of a shape (such as a rectangular prism) to offer multiple perspectives. The same body parts like hands or torsos are rendered differently on different faces. You look at different sides of the sculpture, representations that are visually different yet it is understood that they are all one body, and the same body. Marisol herself is inseparable from her own art. She uses casts of her own face, hands, and feet recurrently, adding an incredibly voyeuristic element to the viewing of the pieces.
“So many of these works on paper seem designed to break down a Cartesian worldview,” curator Cathleen Chaffee writes in the introduction of the exhibition catalog Marisol: A Retrospective, “based, as is much of Western thought, on belief in a stable, unified self, a confident certainty in the separation of mind and body,and that it is through our thinking selves that we access all knowledge.”
Self Portrait (1961-62) by Marisol is a mixed media sculpture including wood, paint, plaster, gold and human teeth. There are seven bodies for, presumably, seven days of the week. Starting from the left: Monday is masked by a hat, no visible eyes despite the recognition of Marisol’s nose and mouth. Tuesday is barely there, painted eyes and carved wood shapes and an open mouth with what looks like human teeth. Wednesday features Marisol’s nose and mouth again, but before she can appear, the rest of the wooden face takes over. Thursday is confined to only a mouth smeared in red lipstick. Friday is like Tuesday — are we still looking at a human face? We must be. These shapes together are what we recognize as a face. Saturday is flat and painted, the most recognizable of a face we get in this lineup and lifeless all the same. Sunday bears Marisol’s face in yawning, an open mouth and painted closed eyes that fade into the wood.
The entire sculpture features two arms, both painted on the wood. One reaches across Monday’s chest, almost protectively. The other reaches from Friday into Thursday, just barely, as if trying to reach another part of the self and utterly unable.
Corte draws parallels between Self Portrait and Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paintings. Monet was trying to capture the same thing at different moments. The cathedral is the same cathedral despite the different times of day. But it is not a singular, fixed thing, made clear by the more than thirty paintings Monet created. Marisol does something similar, capturing a self at multiple points throughout a week. They are all the self, no matter how different. But I think, more eerily, in Marisol’s Self Portrait, no portrait makes quite the full self, even when they are together. Placing all these faces side by side renders any single face incomplete. Rather paradoxically, I think the incompleteness is conveyed by the wholeness of the seven days together.
Marisol’s larger sculptures are sometimes uncanny, acting in a way similar to body horror — the way she transforms and mutates the bodies of her sculptures is evocative because we, as the audience, have a body. And on some subconscious level, we understand that this transformed, mutated body could be ours. The uncanniness of Self Portrait helps convey the horror of putting all the different selves together. The horror, then, lies in the incompleteness at the end of everything coming together. Marisol may be able to put together all these selves, but there is still something jarringly missing when it comes to the person creating these selves. Any cast of Marisol’s facial features are arranged in a way that feels as if it is protruding or being revealed from the wood, never fully her.
Maybe it’s Marisol’s easy assumption that the multiplicity of self is a simple truth of being that drew me to this piece. The self, these seven bodies that are one, is dissonant and ever in flux. But further than that, I think it was also the viscerality of the loss of self that was displayed. The juxtaposition of shape, color and depth that is used to understand the body is viscerally reflected in my own understanding of my physical body. And it becomes easy to feel as if I am as malleable and disjointed as the wood in her artwork. Self Portrait feels like a reassurance about the shared experience of fractured identities, which feels increasingly relevant as social media continues to influence more and more of our lives and the world evolves at breakneck pace. Further, Marisol’s work reminds us to look at multiple and non-normative perspectives. It so easily accepts that we exist as contradictions. It embodies themes of multiplicity of identity, dissolution of self, enmeshment of human and nonhuman so physically, complicating what it means to see and exploring the complicatedness that is being. Her work is a radical way of seeing and also a welcome reassurance.
Pen Fang is a freshman in the College of Arts & Sciences. They can be reached at [email protected].