Laura Soto, spell book 2020-2024, 2020-2024
Laura Soto, December 2024, 2024 detail
The Box, Los Angeles, February-March 2025
lines in Italics are from a poem by Laura Soto
my text is an indirect conversation with the artist, Rosanna Albertini
Photos: Rosanna Albertini improved by Peter Kirby
Laura Soto, summer 2024, 2024
DOTS and more – by Rosanna Albertini
…..bodies from that humid Eve….. (Laura Soto)
Fields of dots: heavier than snowflakes, they have been posed on flat surfaces, sometimes transparent. They refused geometry, only moved their soft density —that slowly shrivels for lack of moisture— into irregular small and bigger spots highly different one from the other. They have all a heart of light
we are an essential impulse
persistence planted there
painted or sculpted out of various materials, the form they took in part on their own is drying up and adjusting to the surface they share. Rigid, luminous drops of life. When they disappear, they leave small pockets excavated into iridescent cavities vaguely containing the memorial of a liquid environment.
Laura Soto, mollusk III, 2024
take the surface with sleep
the artist tells them. In fact they met an obstacle stopping their flight in space, a flatness they had never met. No difference with every life of ours, duly spread on only one canvas from birth to end. We call it life. What is it, really?
Islands floating like rags among the clouds transported by restless energy or blown by illusions, to slowly land and dissolve. We need artworks giving to the human dots a place on which they don’t loosen up, and don’t disappear.
home needs naming
muses to bring through the barrier of sense
Laura Soto, oceans divide slow machines, 2023-2024
Laura Soto, synthetic eden, 2018-2024
But it’s not my wish to sprinkle names over the dots’ populations. A new living existence takes form, artificial, not the one our eyes experience that becomes familiar so much that it seems necessary. Laura Soto’s world is strong, gentle and silent. Long stories are assembled in hand-made books, dots’ stories surfacing even through the thick spongy materials of the covers. Whiteness is impossible. Words were a rigid gate meant to protect meanings. These books are living bodies as mysterious as the bubbles of saliva I loved to blow around my lips as a child, giving free rein to images of me running and jumping in the mid air, ungraspable.
Laura Soto, mercurial wave, 2023-2024
Laura Soto, blue book
Laura Soto, collected compendium, 2022-2024
realm of yearning between time
Creatures from Laura’s hands seem to never cease moving and changing. Her challenge is to shape what does not have a final shape and in so doing produces an enchantment hard to resist.
Laura’s Cave shrinks in a sculpture five years of mental labor. Even paying attention to each perception, to the very efforts to elaborate a personal response, to the imaginary colors wrapping the malleable mixture of the seen and the felt, along with acceptance or refusal, she and we do not have any objective ideas of how the substance of this uninterrupted back and forth through skin and veins, receptors and cells, stays in us, chemically transformed. I’m tempted to say ‘in the end’ although no end is in the living time. But her labor ends as the sculpture appears: layers and layers of dripping, splashing, soft colored solidified areas as complex as the shell’s.
Nature obeys a mathematical order, humans are messy. First of all, they disobey. That’s why Laura Soto’s ordeal is heroic: she shows the imperfect forms taking shape over years, growing, breaking, leaking … and struggling like a pizza dough. Some jewels incrusted, alteration is the only rule.
The Cave has the same singular beauty of some artpieces by Suzanne Jackson. Personal reverberations of the living, so intense that wood, paper, fabrics in layers fold and turn and adapt to her need to escape flatness, maybe also the verbal simplification.
Laura Soto, the cave, 2019-2024 turning around the cave, 4 views:
One might see Laura during her making, collecting the needs of her mind as if they were some distant else, not her life for real.
where was spring and moon and dirt
distance found dreams kneeled, listening
All disembodied actions, separate and secretive. Far, far away from human self or desire. Dreams show submission to the force of all things that are not truly human and that we don’t understand. “ two systems of time, two modes of transformation, two types of forces”. Paul Valéry. These art pieces seem to have been exposed to unknown distances, and bring us to the point in which the ground disappears.
There, walking our mind like a dog on the leash, we enter the sea shell world, as Paul Valéry described it:
“If there were a poetry of the marvels and emotions of the intellect (something I have dreamed of all my life), it could find no subject more delightful and stimulating than the portrayal of a mind responding to the appeal of one of those remarkable natural formations which we observe (or rather make us observe them) here and there, among the innumerable things of indifferent and accidental form that surround us.
Like a pure sound or a melodic system of pure sounds in the midst of noises, so a crystal, a flower, a sea shell stand out from the common disorder of perceptible things… They present us with a strange union of ideas: order and fantasy, invention and necessity, law and exception. In their appearance we find a kind of intention and action that seem to have fashioned them as humans might have done, but at the same time we find evidence of methods forbidden and inaccessible to us.” Paul Valéry Sea Shells, 1964
Ha! marvelous Valéry forgot the visual art world. A world in which dreams detach themselves from the artist and pray and listen, or take in the inhuman voice of the universe. Scratchy at times, uncannily striking or surprising.
A blade of rain cutting the sunlight.
Laura Soto, December 2024, 2024
Jean Dubuffet, Vicissitudes, 1977
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Paul Valéry, Sea Shells, Illustrations by Henri Mondor; Translated by Ralph Manheim; Beacon Press / Boston 1964 Foreword @ 1998 by Mary Oliver
Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems, @ 1923 Vintage Books Edition. Last edition @ 1990 Pay special attention to “Description without place“
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