Spotlight: María Berrío

MARCH 27-MAY 4, 2024

The Spotlight series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork paired with a commissioned piece of writing, creating focused and thoughtful conversations between the visual arts and authors, critics, poets, scholars, and beyond. In this iteration, the Spotlight features María Berrío’s Act II, Scene 2: All Gods are Carnivorous, 2023. A text by author Sarah Blakley-Cartwright accompanies the presentation.

The Calyx and the Corrola
By Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

This is the happy story of my undoing. It is a story of Blue Puya, Lotus Berthelotii, Middlemist Red Camellia, Queen of the Night, Jade Vine, Craspedia Billy Buttons, Pilea Peperomioides, Grande Juliet, waxed amaryllis, Hollyhock, Rock Flower Anemone, Prairie Smoke, Agapanthus, Fire Lily, Ghost Orchid. I passed into another, and this is how it came to pass.

By chance, I meet her. Everything changes in one shake. It is as though she is painted. My world was static. Suddenly, it was all high drama, operatic. She is a collage. She is everything I’ve lost. She is my grandmother. She is love between women. Me? Unbranched, I was a different person every day. She parted the shades of reality, my life disrupted. I dress her. Together, we are adorned.

She is gone and it is the dormant period. There were no more flowers. She was flowers. It was the kind of city where the person you were looking for was hard to find. I had a hyper, almost cyber awareness of her. It was echolocation, tracking her across the city like a dot. I knew where she was. She was inside of me. The biggest change come over this city: people used to care to eavesdrop on one another on the street. Now everyone prefers to hear their own songs.

When I find her, she is positioning flower against flower. Composing her arrangement with the same gravity as if it were a poem, balancing color against form.
“Flowers,” she says, “I love them as symbolism and outside of symbolism.”
There are no windows, she is enclosed, wrapped in textile, vicuna, damaco, qiviut, lotus silk, golden fleece, mulberry, sheep’s wool, golden threads. She is a cushioned landing.

Most astonishing: we never regarded one another. Sun too bright for the eyes. What more could her simple form have told me? We looked away together. We were one person with two sets of eyes. What I wore she wore.
Rissa.
Chora.
Rissa.
The frills on the spathe. Her name a shelter above me. I’d found it a new religion. I was richer than a billionaire. I had millions of acres.

We slept. We fell like the dead. That was our intimacy.
Do you feel it? she murmured.
I understood and did not need to answer. She did not need me to.

But when we woke, she was indifferent. And then she told me what she was. What she’d done. How she could never go back. How time had stopped for her. The repulse of revelation, of learning something you wish you’d never known. She showed me her mask, an invitation.
“Is it for protection?” I asked.
“No, it is for possibility.”
“I would be all of it, story, song, and dance. I would know what to say. I would be vibrant.”
“Flowers,” she’d said, “I love them as symbolism and outside of symbolism.”
They are not one thing. Therein lies their power.

And therein mine. Becoming invoked risk. I would buy my concealment. Energy to bloom. I felt the warning in my organs, some kind of premonition, my very soul at stake. Too many patterns, suddenly. Too many flowers. Pads, blades, perianths, and bracts. My eyes ached. Vision swimming. I’ve always been a maximalist. Prey to adornment. I staggered to my flower.
Trembling, I was passive before what had to be done. That had been my misconstrual: there was no choice. I would reach beyond my identity to something more correct. My existence would be predicated on hers.
I was steel-soft, mature, open, and ready. Imminence. The leap: I put on the mask.

An abrupt hypothermic cold: I was reanimated, wearing a face that was not my own. The balance of power was total. I was mighty. Immolated, I was bigger than a loving body. My soul, anima being marrow, was purged.

And so we come together again, this time seated in mutual respect. Fulfillment, conjoining, and embrace. Together, finally, two souls evaporated like two drops of sea. She entered the stream of me, whatever was in me that kept everything alive. The thread between us was stretched tight as a winch. I was afraid it would endure, afraid it would abate. An ache in the womb, deeper than flesh. There is not another anything here.

So, this was a tragedy. I felt it in stomach, where I felt tattered, torn into pieces. Flowers were impossible. They would never come. An endless winter, a cold with no end. We were petals folding. We collapsed, became dry and shrank, parched. How could a heart so confident be so empty and so full? Full of empty stuff, fuzz, and thistledown.

Hadn’t this been the long story of my falling? It was perfectly natural. The agony would be slow, long, and piercing and still it would be no sacrifice. I felt my discipline crystallize. I reached for it, a short sword.
It’s not darkness, she said, stooping, peering out her mask. It’s mystery.
And she helped me tie my knees.

About:

María Berrío (b. 1982, Bogotá, Colombia) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Berrío earned a BFA from Parsons School of Design, New York, NY in 2004 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include María Berrío: The Children’s Crusade, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2023); María Berrío: The Land of the Sun, Victoria Miro, Venice, Italy (2022); María Berrío: Esperando mientras la noche florece (Waiting for the Night to Bloom), Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL (2021); among others. Berrío’s work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Friends & Lovers, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2023); Spirit in the Land, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC (2023); A Natural Turn: María Berrío, Joiri Minaya, Rosana Paulino, and Kelly Sinnapah Mary, De Paul Art Museum, Chicago, IL (2022); Women Painting Women, Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, Forth Worth, TX (2022); and Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from ICA Miami’s Collection, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL (2022); among others. Her work is included in numerous public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; among others.

Sarah Blakley-Cartwright is the author of Alice Sadie Celine (Simon Books, Simon & Schuster, 2023). She is also the author of Red Riding Hood (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers), a New York Times #1 bestseller that was published worldwide in thirty-eight editions and fifteen languages. Sarah is the editor of The Artist's Library, featuring conversation with artists on their most beloved books, transcribed, and appearing monthly at Hauser & Wirth's Ursula magazine. She is publishing director of the Chicago Review of Books and associate editor of A Public Space.

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