Carlos Rigau is a Cuban-American artist, raised in Miami’s Little Havana and currently based in Brooklyn. He works principally (though not exclusively) with the moving image and what he terms video-sculpture. Rigau co-founded and now runs General Practice, an experimental space in Bushwick dedicated to exploration and collaboration between artists. Rigau also hosts “General Practice Presents,” a New York cable access show filmed at BRIC studios and broadcast on Wednesdays at midnight. The program expands General Practice’s ethos toward collective behavior, and has featured interviews with the Jack Roy collective, artist-run music label Primitive Languages, and end/SPRING BREAK, a Miami/NY artist group.

Underpinning Rigau’s prodigious output is his natural facility as a charismatic social organizer. This manifests through his ability to bring people together via art events, after-parties, and openings, from the Lower East Side scene to major city institutions, where he often DJs. During Art Basel Miami in December, Rigau worked between his solo show, “Santa’s Toy Shop Goes to Cuba,”“at Meeting House, a presentation at Pulse Fair with LMAK Gallery, and an extensively covered — yet controversially cancelled — beachside performance called Dance of the Designer Refugee, for Untitled Fair in collaboration with Helper Gallery. 

Within his own practice, a founding interest and constant theme, is the subject of artifice. Rigau explains: “It’s to do with where I grew up. Artifice is a big part of Miami life, and accepting that aspect of the city is to acknowledge my own upbringing within it and how that background informs my work.”

It was during a trip to Las Vegas — a city that takes artifice to greater excess than perhaps anywhere else — that an informative irony was revealed to him. “I was standing there among these facsimiles of great buildings, these copies of European capitals and iconic works of art — the Sistine Chapel, the garish beauty, the pinging cacophony of slot machines. It just hit me, that it isn’t fake. The facsimile is more lifelike today, certainly in terms of our data selves and the skewed realities we present. The plasticity of Miami (or Las Vegas) is real and it is authentic and it is a great thing — not as a copy of the original Venice or New York, but great in and of itself.”

Relatedly, Rigau looks to the the darker side of Miami life: the extremes of social economics, lurid newspaper headlines, drug use, unusual behaviors. “Sensational things happen in Miami. Maybe it has something to do with its position as an apex of the Bermuda Triangle,” he says. “I love that aspect of Miami that is like an adolescent looking for attention.” This too percolates into his working method, so that a thread of discontent is extant. He asks “Why do so many weird things come out of the city?” He aims to locate the viewer in a moment where accepted understanding of one’s place in the corporeality of daily life is jarred or shaken by confrontation with the unexpected, the esoteric or even the mystical. “The frustration of the underclass and the anger permeating some of my work is an outcome of the artifice. It’s not an antidote — it’s an outcome. I want to create through artifice, and to create some kind of disturbance in the everyday.” That attitude is exemplified in Rigau’s current solo exhibition “Delusions Through Details” at LMAK Gallery in New York.

The exhibition consists of a single video sculpture with two projections, seen from opposite sides of the gallery. The films are housed in a box-like structure typical of department store-style Formica display pedestals. One video shows a window with an unremarkable urban view across city buildings. Through extensive editing, the scene becomes dislocated, as layers, including crackling bubble wrap, appear to obscure the window. Strange symbols of an unfamiliar language emerge on the panes, and spots of melting flames drip and sizzle in gravity-defying directions. The other screen shows a model skull on a white workbench, replete with hat and pin, in enigmatic, muted colors. An aproned figure standing behind the skull begins to break it apart, fingers frantically working, until it is in pieces, at which point the video reverses and the skull is marvelously reformed, as fragments of Styrofoam cranium weld back together.

Both videos are so painstakingly altered from their opening frames that visual understanding is arrested and any linear narrative of what is happening is corrupted. “Everyday materials sometimes are charged with something beyond their functionality,” he explains. “When I’m around bubble wrap, I want to pop it. It is at the point where your senses are fully engaged, that things start to feel otherworldly.” A potent aspect of the work is the seeming contradiction of quotidian items and magical symbolism. “Through editing and shooting, the image reveals optical tricks,” says Rigau, “as when a glass in front of the window ‘breaks’ and the viewer sees another layer of glass behind. Other times layers are removed by ‘cheesy’ artificial editing effects. These approaches to editing add up to an affect of disembodiment upon the viewer.”

“Some members of my family have practiced African-Caribbean religions such as Palo and Santeria. For example, you’re driving your new car and you feel under the seat and find that there’s a decorated coconut shell, and you think, How did that get there? It turns out to be a good-luck amulet — blessed, I believe, by Elegguá, the custodian spirit of travel — and placed there without telling the recipient, Rigau says, returning to his familial and cultural background in Little Havana to provide insight into this area of his work. “This interaction with an unknown realm pierces the humdrum of what we expect while driving from A to B. That has imbued me with an acceptance of a certain darkness in life. I’m not a practitioner of these beliefs, but they are a part of my early experience and I do think that there is a supernatural world, or a not visible or understood world.” 

Ultimately, Rigau considers artistic process to be art world language for what could be more accurately described as “ritual.” His ritual — subtly informed by autobiographical, magical and historical frameworks — involves a constant process of making and destroying within the physical backdrops he sets up for his videos, similar to the way that a priest or shaman would set up specific environments to aid the practice of their rites. The results are often mesmerizing spatial and dimensional experiences where visual uncertainty and symbolic motifs cause a temporary fusion between the familiar tropes of daily life, and unknown planes that may lie just beyond our comprehension.

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2014
Joan Boykoff Baron and Reuben M. Baron at Art Miami

2013
Nico McIan at the Rubell, de la Cruz, and Marguiles Collections
Franklin Einspruch at Art Miami
Nico McIan at UNTITLED

2012
David Cohen at NADA
David Cohen at Art Basel Miami Beach

2011
Franklin Einspruch at Pulse
Joan Boykoff Baron and Reuben M. Baron at Art Miami
THE EDITORS at Art Basel Miami Beach
David Cohen at Art Basel Miami Beach

2007
John Zinsser at the fairs

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It was only Thursday, December 1, but Vixen, a Shiba Inu belonging to Miami collector Sean Gelb, had had enough of the fairs. She lay on her side, panting, at the foot of a pedestal holding one of Patricia Piccinini’s mutant babies. People crowded the booth of Conner Contemporary Art at the Pulse Art Fair to gawk at it, but Vixen remained steadfastly unimpressed.

I’ve been through the trial of fair going in Miami enough times to have worked out a two-part strategy that forestalls the moment when I start feeling like Vixen. Part One is to proudly not see everything. My list for this year was Art Miami, Pulse, Scope and Art Asia (combined in the same circus tent this year), Seven, and Edge Zones. Skipping the main fair may sound like treason, but it means enough art-viewing impetus is left to appreciate the plenitude on offer at six others, which is considerable.

Part Two is to accept the fact that you are at the art equivalent of a farmer’s market. You are there only to admire and sample some minuscule fraction of its bounty.

On Thursday at Pulse, some critical part of my brain titled like a shoved pinball machine when I saw the actor Michael Douglas and the comely rear view of Catherine Zeta Jones making their way through a corridor of art made dark by one of the power outages that plagued the early days of the fair. This is no way to see art, I thought, nor perhaps Catherine Zeta Jones. I wandered toward the exit, where Paul Kusseneers, whose eponymous gallery was showing atmospheric, filmy, grid-based abstractions by Stefan Annarel, stood fuming in the half-light. Even in the dim booth Annarel looked good, but imagine coming all the way from Antwerp and having to present them that way. A longtime Miami artist speculated, without evidence but not without cause, that the fair organizers hadn’t adequately greased the city’s palm. I overheard a man in a black suit, clutching a walkie-talkie, explain to a gallery director in romantic lighting that a generator was being installed posthaste and they were not going to wait for the local utility to restore power.

By Sunday, this or better had been accomplished. I make a habit of asking dealers whether they’re having a good fair, without detailing what I mean by that. Everyone, even Kusseneers, answered yes and seemed sincere about it. So with that problem solved, it was time for a second pass at the art.

Duane Hanson, whose work I had seen the day before at Bridge Red Studios Project Space in North Miami, came to mind upon reviewing Piccinni’s animal-human hybrid infant at Conner Contemporary. How much more difficult it must have been for Hanson to achieve sculptural photorealism with 1970s materials. This new take speaks to an imminent biotechnological future in which more and more things are going to demand human treatment despite their categorical position at the edge of humanity. As art, though, it was too illustrative and sentimental. (Charming and patently illustrative work by Maira Kalman, executed for author Michael Pollan’s “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual” and appearing at Julie Saul, somehow escaped a similar fate.) Also at Conner was a meticulously painted lesbian orgy on a picnic table at night by Erik Thor Sandberg, inexplicably executed on a dramatically curved panel. Doubtless there was some allegory at work – there usually is in Sandberg – but it resisted deciphering, and not to its credit.

Conner also had a handsome Leo Villareal, which I mentioned while admiring a small, animated LED piece, amber and flickering, by Jim Campbell at Hosfelt Gallery. This turned out to be a bit of a touchy subject – the gallery noted Campbell’s earlier work with the medium. Better works of technology-driven abstraction, which is still at its early stages, is at least as successful as its better constructivist counterparts. Bitforms showed a work by Zimoun in which cardboard chits were mounted on little spindles and made to spin and collide in a crowded grid. It was charmingly low budget and seemed to have a determined personality.

There was a note of controversy around some non-technology-driven abstraction as well. Daniel Weinberg Gallery had some small geometric abstractions that looked as if they were studies for Frank Stella’s protractor series, both in shape and pastel palette. They turned out to be works by Walter Darby Bannard, whose art and writings I have studied at length, and they actually predate Stella’s series.

Flirting abstractly with both paint and technology were Michael Laube at Kuckei & Kuckei, Sharon Louden at Morgan Lehman, and Markus Weggenmann at Thomas Taubert Contemporary. Laube had painted a variety of stripes and marks on layers of superimposed Plexiglas, and despite an initial impression of excessive trickiness they held up to repeated viewing. Louden’s deliberate, spare paintings in oil on paper on panel distantly recalled Julius Bissier, reinterpreted in high-key materials. The attractive sensibility refused to translate into her video or sculpture, as evidenced by examples thereof placed alongside them. Weggenmann sends out designs for simple abstractions and semi-abstractions to be executed in high-gloss coatings on aluminum. The lack of touch looks good in enamel-like paints like this, and big, simple shapes tend to stand out at the fairs as visual respites. Jus Juchtmans at Margaret Thatcher Projects served this purpose as well.

At a certain point of art viewing, patterns emerge unbidden from the surfeit of material. Was there an architectural trend at Pulse, exemplified by Gregory Euclide’s whimsical wall-mounted landscape sculptures at David B. Smith, Sarah KcKenzie’s luscious studies of house framing in oil (better than her larger, deadpan treatments of finished buildings) at Jen Bekman Projects, Isidro Blasco’s snappy urban photo-collages at Black & White Project Space, and Ayssa Dennis’s delicately drawn architectural fantasies at Kesting Ray? Was there some kind of weird angle on female sexuality, given data points that include Erik Thor Sandberg, Jeff Bark’s C-Print of a bosomy nude oddly arrayed in kneeling profile among strips of Super-8 film at Hasted Kraeutler, and Hillary Harnkess’s Sinking of the Bismark (2002), a naval disaster acted out by scantily uniformed crew in a style reminiscent of early Renaissance masters, at Daniel Weinberg?  Or was it just time to go home?

But not before stopping in the Impulse section of the fair, dedicated to single-artist installations. Ellen Miller Gallery, for instance, were showing the work of Deb Todd Wheeler, whose photogrammed cyanotypes of plastic bags hauntingly evoke sea life, despite their origins as garbage. Teresa Diehl closed off the booth of Galerie Anita Bekcers for a installation of predatory mammals and fighter jets, cast in clear glycerin, arranged over a spotlit, rotating mirror and covered with a camouflage net of flowers. She made it in response to the revolutions in the Middle East this year, but it grew into a transcendent, timeless narrative. I came to rest at the work of Alia Malley at Sam Lee. Her Frederick-Church-inspired photographs of the Los Angeles County landscape, either deserted or literally desert, presented inviting vistas, refreshingly free of crowds and, well, art.

Now it was time, like Vixen, to find a floor to lie on.

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on view at It Ain’t Fair, presented by O.H.W.O.W., 3100 NW 7 Avenue, Miami, Florida 305 633 9345, featuring Deitch Projects, Peres Projects, Nueva Galeria De La Barra, A.S.S. Gallery, A.M.P., Picturebox and TV Books with curators Tim Barber, Kathy Grayson, Andreas Melas, Dan Nadel, Pablo de la Barra, Nicola Vassell and Terence Koh, through December 7

This was a PIC OF THE FAIRS in December 2008.

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