THINK “OUTSIDE THE BOX”

What can be seen in the image? At first sight, it seems to be an average cardboard box the type used for shipping and storage. The shipping symbols and marks guides (handle with care, this way up, and fragile) are represented by globally recognized pictograms that give the precise instructions to protect the content of the box. But let’s take a look again.

There is nothing inside the box, in fact, there’s nothing fragile nor susceptible to be handled with care. However, from an aerial view you can see a group of white, pristine pearls that seem to be part of the packaging of that valuable object that is not there. Also, there is something strange about these small pearls scattered on the floor. When you touch them, you do not feel the typical softness of crushed expanded polyethylene, on the contrary, their smooth surface and weight give us signs of their material: ceramic.

Sonnia has forced us again to think outside the box by making the invitation to educate our sight and mind. The work called Delicado (Fragile) proposed a pun that transcends the reference of the art’s history (Brillo Box by Andy Warhol, for example) in order to establish rather a Duchampian game.

By resorting to the meaning of the word delicado, which derives from the Latin delicātus, we see that there are two acceptations of this adjective that apply to the analysis of the artwork; The first definition is breakable or easy to deteriorate; the second one is requiring great care, caution, or tact. Undoubtedly, Delicado is more related to the last definition as ceramic in spite of having the faculty of breaking easily, is nevertheless one of the materials that lasts the longest in time. Delicado tells us about that scrupulous process that the artist has carried out to elaborate 1,600 white pearls in ceramics imitating the original material. A process that can take months.

Delicado, not only arouses admiration in the virtuosity of the artist making, but also shows the art’s passive view as object of contemplation. Thus, the work invites us to think about sculpture in a classic conceptual frame that is updated in the self-questionings of the artistic technique from that trompe l'oeil of contemporary everyday objects. these have been rebuilt using traditional techniques such as ceramics and that have been chosen on the dynamics' work of the XXI century work.

Delicado,alludes to the globalization and the immediacy of the current trade. It emulates an empty cardboard box whose real content has been made available to the spectator. A content that is left to the discretion of this new public who think “outside the box”.


Andrea Rincón.