On Vitality in Art  by Jovana Stokic
Graciela Cassel’s manifold artistic practice shows -- in diverse media and formats -- her circling to some constant preoccupations. In the last two decades of her prolific output, the artist has embraced several completely new materials and types of engagements, processes and methodologies. What makes them recognizably part of a unique authorship is her fascination in power of materials to transform and interact. Keenly studying new  materials and processes, Cassel is underlying magical connection of elemental materials – light, water, air – with new technologies. 

Sculptures and installations inspired by the explorations of ever-changing quality of nature capture this desire to achieve an equivalent to movement as the main principle.  Cohesive element in Cassel’s output is her gentle care for the viewers’ experience  - as a soothing gesture of inviting them to share the fleeting vision – of vitality itself. In her videos and mixed-media installations, she meant the viewers to together experience the dreamlike states of clouds evoked in the mist enclosed within the glass, in a kaleidoscopic moving image, or in a reflection of a neon light on mirrored surface. The cohesive force that connects these pieces is the artist’s belief that image, no matter how unattainable, fleeting and impossible to reproduce is going to be conjured by her actions. Cassel evokes the mirage, its  incomparable intensity being a challenge for her digital images. Indeed, her videos are about cherished memories reaching our present, when and how they want to, outside of our willing control. If we are confronted by these impossibilities of capturing light, dreams, memories, life itself, what is art’s power then? It emerges when one spend time dwelling in Cassel’s dreamscapes – in her imagined worlds that are transcribing nature. Her merging of diverse elements like refractions of light, like its echoes and meditative visual ensembles that allow us to conjure in our minds those magical moments that are ever fleeting any recording devices. It can be said that it is about art’s ability to speak of vitality in its way, as powerfully and eternally, as nature itself. This is the key of understanding how multidisciplinarity plays such a big role in Cassel’s artistic output. In a multivocal dialogue between materials and procedures – traditional and new, sculptural and video – the artist defines her goals of communication between nature and technology. Moreover, they show her faith in inter-connections and hope for co-existences. 

Cassel’s proclivities for mixed media have already been present in her Windmills and Water-wheels (2007).  The dreamy painted images are encased in a body of Plexiglas, implying their floating state, while underlining their objectness. 

Painted installation Fantastic Cities develops a tremendously subtle connection with the viewer’s own sense of space – as it enfolds linearly, following the logic of a dream as well. The artist often brings to the fore certain sensibility that can be traced to Jorge Luis Borges’s style of narration and symbolism. On the surface, there are labyrinths, mirrors, rivers, and tigers. But, for Borges himself, these were only the starting point to reach the unutterable logic, the unthinkable beyond rational – which can be translated only in images, unattainable themselves. To solve this impossibility, artist creates a set of loose translatory operations, from materials that can accommodate this unstable quality of thought, memory, and feelings.  In her most evocative works, the videos, Cassel is not using simbology of water, light, (or tigers) to allude to something else – they are there in order to provoke a state beyond language. On the whole, video works capture movement as their crucial quality.  In this way, lush and imaginative moving images the artist has created established video as a perfect medium that can become a veritable equivalent of a dreamscape of recovered memories, and subliminal, circular journeys into her sensitive unconsciousness.

Cassel extraordinary care for the articulation of the connections between images and objects can be seen in her earlier mixed-media  sculptures such as  Pure Interiority (2000).  They compellingly embody these ideas of images being encapsulated, always interconnected to their surroundings.  The motives of figures are never treated as enshrined by their sculptural framework. It can be said that they are not simply fixed by the objects that carry them.  This beautiful dialogue between loose movements of water and light and the stable forms is the principle that came to be the key for Cassel’s recent complex objects and installations. In her ambitious recent spatial installations, the artist boldly juxtaposes small and large video screens, and  projections, with glass, neon, resin, as well as wood, and metal elements.  The unusual combination of technologically complicated and elemental is her language. In it, the artist has been achieving a tremendous sense of balance – the natural elements (like steam and light) are never subdued only to serve a certain atmosphere, they all together create a life-giving, dynamic  vision. And what is of utmost importance, her installations are always inviting – opening to the viewer to project their sensibilities and memories of what is to come after.  Cassel’s vision is not a nostalgic one, it is always directed towards new possibilities – towards ameliorations, quiet personal utopias to be reached, if only. 

Jovana Stokic is a Belgrade-born, New York-based art historian and curator. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.