RAQUEL QUIJANO FELICIANO
Modern Times - By Joel Weinstein
When you peer into the reliquary-like niches of Raquel Quijano’s Andamios, or scaffoldings—and it is easy to be drawn close, to be seduced by the riddling play of mirrored surfaces, bright colors, and strangely iconic shapes within these small depths—you find yourself lost in one of the work’s many paradoxes. The enclosures perform the magic of seeming both tiny and colossal. At times these spaces suggest the perfectly preserved evidence of vanished civilizations, and at others the antechambers of the alien worlds we learned of via the 1950s space cadet adventures of radio, television, and the Sunday funnies.
Step back and the andamios take on the look of an energized here and now. In spite of being shelf-size, the works are monumental in their intentions, their zappy silver and black surfaces a complicated system of piston-like machinery and what seem to be circuit-boards. They are robotic and intriguingly architectural at the same time. They partake of the quixotic spirit of anime and the overstuffed bombast of propaganda. If your imagination is particularly supple, Quijano’s work constitutes an intricate play of abstract forms that add up to nothing exactly but suggest a great deal about the energy fields, subsurface conduits, and wacky science that might very well underlie the workings of our cities.
Quijano calls these works prints, and, as you can see from the matrices that hang beside them, indeed they are. This is one of their most intricate, delightful puzzlements since a print has, for the most part, always been a flat thing like a painting or drawing. So in this way the andamios are a sly challenge to traditional artistic practice. But they are also toys of a sort, an idea as fun as science fiction, and a piercing vision of what we call modernity.