CLAUDIA COMTE
FROM WHERE WE RISE
FUNDACIÓN CASA WABI, PUERTO ESCONDIDO, OAXACA, MEXICO
PERMANENT INSTALLATION SINCE 2024
The version of the American Southwest and Monument Valley (Arizona/Utah, USA) featured in the Looney Tunes cartoons starring Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner has been cited before as a source for the landscapes of Claudia Comte. Which may sound odd bordering on insulting at first, but is actually serious interpretation. The awesomely composed quality of Comte’s work tends to mask the purposeful ludicrousness of its manias. Just as the exuberance on display in those cartoons – which regularly veers into a fairly nakedly vicious insanity that we choose, heads buried in the sand, to interpret as mere silliness – camouflages the fact that they are artifacts of the cold war and entirely symptomatic of its psychopathies.
Claudia Comte, FROM WHERE WE RISE (FREESTANDING WALL, SOIL PAINTING), 2024
Concrete block, plaster, acrylic, and soil; photo by Gustavo Eduardo Nigenda Vásquez © Studio Claudia Comte, 2024
The mindlessly brutal struggle between Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner reflects the fear and anxiety of living under the perpetual threat of imminent nuclear holocaust. The supposedly natural enmity between the two protagonists is satire. The arms race in which they engage is satire. The absence of any meaningful communication between them besides violence is satire. The landscape they “inhabit,” that of the Manhattan project (the frequent use of miniature mushroom clouds drives home the point), is a harbinger of the post-apocalyptic environmental conditions – nuclear winter covering a global desert – that were/are one of its most likely byproducts. Theirs is a bleak world devoid of sense, in which a bland cruelty mocks the idea of detente and has replaced any shred of humanity. And so is ours.
Claudia Comte, FROM WHERE WE RISE (FREESTANDING WALL, SOIL PAINTING), 2024
Concrete block, plaster, acrylic, and soil; photo by Gustavo Eduardo Nigenda Vásquez © Studio Claudia Comte, 2024
The cold war sort of ended, but we have managed to find new ways to induce the world to careen perpetually out of control – with a solid majority of us abetting its ruin through willful, blind allegiance to our own self interests. The immediate sources of fear have shifted: from nuclear war to climate change, for example, but the sense of impotence and the resultant anxiety have not. Comte’s work seethes with frustrated helplessness: about the state of things and the seeming impossibility of doing anything about it with art. Her amiable-seeming bulbous biomorphism is satire. Her dalliances with the appearances and operations of space design are satire. The explicit femininity with which she suffuses her work – luxuriously sensuous material treatments, a general sinuosity, and extreme formal beauty – are satire. And they almost manage sometimes to cloak her anger at the unbelievable mess we've made of the world.
Some of Comte’s work is explicit in protest. Her recent HAHAHA paintings, with titles like A PLASTIC BAG DRIFTING UNDERWATER OVER A CORAL REEF (HAHAHA PAINTING), 2022, and A MOTHER AND CHILD AT A MACAQUE BREEDING FACILITY (HAHAHA PAINTING), 2022, suggest both supervillain glee in evil triumph and the frantic quality of laugh-or-cry despair in the face of avoidable calamity. A recent series of what are essentially funerary reliefs for flora in white marble (a la Roman sepulcher sculpture) carry titles such as DECREASED RAINFALL LINKED WITH TROPICS DEFORESTATION and NEARLY A THIRD OF WORLD'S CACTI FACE EXTINCTION, SAYS IUCN. Which makes works such as FROM WHERE WE RISE – her wall painting for Casa Wabi based on her exhibition of the same name – which is less patently political, seem like something else. But in truth, it is all in protest. Including this seemingly serene desert landscape within a desert landscape, which, with its fever-dream, wobbly tree ring moires and symbolic cacti cenotaphs, is in fact a strategically disoriented and pointedly disorienting cry for help.
Photo by Gustavo Eduardo Nigenda Vásquez © Studio Claudia Comte, 2024
FROM WHERE WE RISE is something like a diorama created to tell the story of the death of the Earth for a natural history museum on another planet a million years from now. As such it should be classified not only with Op art 2D v. 3D experiments in perception, but other citizen-of-the-world, plight-of-humanity monuments such as Isamu Noguchi's "Sculpture to Be Seen From Mars", a vast land art epitaph to humanity that Noguchi proposed in 1949 under the assumption that the dawn of the atomic age signaled the inevitability of our self-annihilation.
Claudia Comte, FROM WHERE WE RISE (FREESTANDING WALL, SOIL PAINTING), 2024
Concrete block, plaster, acrylic, and soil; photo by Leilani Avila Lynch © Studio Claudia Comte, 2024
FROM WHERE WE RISE does offer at least a glimmer of hope beyond the rhythms of naturally derived beauty. It is fashioned from local soil and, despite the bleak connotations, exists in harmony with the forbidding but irrepressibly fecund local environment. If the world as we know it ends – at the hands of eight billion non-custodial, negligently terracidal human beings – maybe Oaxaca is one place where life, in some form, will take root to rise again.
© Text by Dakin Hart, Curator, Fundación Casa Wabi