A Return to Dirt

Gisela Colón spent her childhood exploring El Yunque, Puerto Rico’s rainforest on the outskirts of her grandfather’s farm, and painting with her mother. At night she would dream of outer space and far away lands, an expansive view of the world inherited from her chemist father. Last year the sculptor returned to the plot of mountainous land in Arecibo, Puerto Rico that was left to her when he passed away. She kneeled in the red soil of her ancestors, collected dirt and hematite rocks, and gazed down at the ocean that peeks out from between the trees.

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Now, Colón is bringing a piece of her homeland to Efraín López in New York with a work made with pigments from the land mixed with iridescent minerals like mica in “Mountains Are Inside Me,” the artist’s first show with the gallery. One towering, hand-sculpted vessel from her “Parabolic Monolith” series is entitled Tierra de Substrato Arecibo Hematita (Parabolic Monolith Hematite), 2024. A second sculpture will accompany the earthy monolith: an abstract self-portrait of sorts. Scaled to the artist’s height, the pod presents her body as a part of the landscape. “I am growing from the earth and becoming like a tree,” Colón explains.

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At Efraín López, the Arecibo terrain will also appear in its raw form, dirt and rocks, arranged in an intervention that will surprise and transport. “It's really meaningful because we all come from the elements. So here we are. I'm hematite,” Colón says, wrapping her arms around a red-brown hued sculpture in her studio that oscillates colors and emits a glow as we walk around it. 

Colón’s oeuvre is made up of pods, monoliths, and slabs, among other natural structures and obelisk shapes. Each sculpture reverberates with energy and taps into a sense of power and resilience that comes from a place of powerlessness. Gun violence cast a shadow over Colón’s childhood in the 1970s, both within her community and her own home. Her radiant cones aren’t just mountains: they are also bullets. They contain the history of colonization and political unrest that shaped the world as she knew it as a diasporic Puerto Rican, as well as the forest where she took refuge. 

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“I channel that all in my work as a way of purging it,” the artist offers. “It's cathartic to transform bullets, projectiles, and implements of violence into sculptures that emanate transformation and light and life and bring the negative into a positive experience.”

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Home means many things for Colón, who left her native Puerto Rico for California in pursuit of an expansive and transformative freedom, the chance to heal—and who returns regularly to commune with the land that gave her refuge. 

After she lost her mother at 12 years old, she returned to the eucalyptus trees of her youth with an added sense of urgency. Her teenage years were marked with further misfortunes and an increasingly turbulent relationship with her father, and she rooted herself in nature and learned to survive. When a chance to study environmental law in the United States brought her to Los Angeles in 1990, she abstracted those childhood views with oil and canvas and showed her works at project spaces in Venice and Santa Monica. Soon, however, she began expanding beyond canvas. In the early 2000s she gave birth to her two sons and was imbued with a sense of purpose. She set out to create something new and began layering oil on wood. 

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Then, in 2011, everything changed after a visit with the late artist DeWain Valentine in Marfa, Texas, where the vast sky connects with the land. “I put my painting next to one of his sculptures in his office, which was filled with clocks on the walls,” Colón remembers. “It struck me that the painting seemed overwrought. You could see too much of the process, and I remember thinking: God there must be a way that I could sculpt where the visible hand disappears, so that the viewer then can have a pure perceptual experience of light and color.” She set out to eliminate paint all together. She began using acrylic and automotive lacquers on what became an early prototype for her pods, structural, iridescent glowing sculptures that evoke an embryo, a portal, a cosmic shimmer, a prehistoric being, and an opal all at once. When Colón discovered optical materials, her vision began to coalesce. 

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“One day I put two or three things on top of each other, actually in this same spot,” Colón tells me as we weave in and out of her luminescent works in her industrial, light-filled warehouse studio. “It caught a little bit of light and reflected back into my eye, and I got that sense of glow. I said I'm onto something here,” she recalls. From that fateful discovery, Colón has continued to expand and probe what she calls “a fluid color spectrum,” which she likens to the perceptual sensation you get when you look at, say, an abalone shell and see various tones depending on how you rotate around it. These layers of meaning-imbued materials are a cosmic response to the minimal sculptures of her peers, as well as the Finish Fetish and Light and Space movements she is often associated with.

The forms appear as if they have risen from the ground, I observe. They look alive. “They’re like cells or conduits of life,” she agrees, adding that each work has its own personality. “He is denser and quieter, and then she's more energetic and wild,” she says with a smile, pointing to a large, wide gold-green monolith and his taller iridescent companion in shifting shades of blue and pink.

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Transformation is the through line in Colón’s work. She has spent her artistic practice creating a cosmic language that both obscures and metamorphoses the deeply personal. “Death is part of life, as is that sense of constant mutability we experience as humans,” she says. “Instead of fearing this, I embody it.”

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The artist says she dreams of building an intervention at the now-defunct ​​Observatory de Arecibo in Puerto Rico, where she grew up visiting the largest telescope in the world. “It opened my mind to wanting to discover what lies beyond the earth,” she muses, adding, “In 1974, it beamed a coded message of light into space that is still traveling today.” As I look at the afternoon light pouring in from the open garage doors of her studio, I can’t help but imagine those messages cascading down from outer space and shining through Colón’s luminous forms.

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“Mountains Are Inside Me" is on view from April 30 until June 22, 2024 at Efraín López at 356 Broadway Unit LL15, New York, NY 10013.