Laura Figa
Last Entry
Et al. Gallery
620 Kearny St.
It’s unclear if there is a word that embodies the care and gentleness and hand-sized scale of these new drawings and sculptures by Laura Figa. Made from graphite and defined by that material’s softness, both the works on paper and her hand-carved graphite pieces request thoughtful movements during examination to avoid smudging or disrupting them. It is not surprising that this body of work is formally and conceptually underpinned by dance notation, a technology based around such spatial awareness.
In the drawings, carefully defined forms take up the space they need without exactly telling or showing. The marks operate within reach of familiar vocabularies—moments of a tree’s shadow on the side of a building, the mitered corner of window molding, lines of a poem on a page—without replicating something known. Each component is amorphous in structure, but held in relation via the shared plane of paper supported by steel. Blankness is intrinsic to the composition; it exacts nuance from these shards in a manner corresponding to the space around a written letter, which in its proportion consummates its legibility.
Apicals, the apexes (perhaps) of Figa’s vernacular, push away from any type of flatness or blankness. Whittled out of solid graphite they rest on a slender platform. They are decorative specimens, and yet, imagined held in a hand their tool-ness becomes clear. Like a dowsing rod or tuning fork, their communication potential is manifested in relation to a body. The contrast of their warm curves joined with straight limbs mimics the mutual sensitivity needed by person and apparatus to find the understanding they seek.
This act of divining, this close looking, this gentle navigating, this quiet speaking, pushes inwards and outwards simultaneously, growing substance, while cleaving away what is extraneous. Operating not sequentially, but dimensionally, each drawn form and hewn shape accrues associations through which it constructs spaces of control and significance. Infinite despite their fixed appearance, each entry could be the last, but never is.
- Claire Frost