Yes, the artist states that she wants these works to be approached without — or maybe beyond — thought, perhaps by the viewer simply for their sensual selves, but maybe also for the artist as she is making them. I see a tantalizing paradox in this idea and the works before me,however. To create a work that is perfectly without thought —which I see these works as decidedly not being — requires thoughtfulness and precision far beyond the ordinary. I shall tryto explain this.

As marvelous to look at as Verónica Sahagún’s works are, it is the questions and thoughts they engender that occupy my mind just now. What, for instance, are her processes in making them? Is chance, maybe even lucky accident, involved? Are they indeed casual in their appearance and manufacture, or are they the result of diligent, labor-intensive creation, the minute, highly subjective, thoughtful (and maybe thought-provoking) adjustments that are essential to bring about the illusion of freedom and no-thought? Or, perhaps on closer inspection, they don’t look casual and free at all. They seem so direct and purposeful that they must be the result of strict conception and ordering; thinking, even. Which is it? What’s going on here?

I recall one of Sahagún’s works from several years ago. It consisted of a perfectly shaped, rectangular bar of beeswax precisely placed, just so, on a plain, flat surface. There were just these two objects in perfect harmony, nothing was out of place. I wondered, at the time, if the wax bar were repositioned, would the work’s perfection be destroyed, or would it look just as good? I was reminded of the notion that in a Baroque Dutch landscape painting, the placement of the cows seems always to be exactly right, but that someone had suggested that the paintings were conceived in such a way that no matter where the cows were situated, they would always appear to be in exactly the right spots. John Cage, in relation to that sort of thought, said that if one asks the right questions, one will always get the right answers; i. e., if you create the right situation/environment, no matter what happens therein, everything will turn out just fine. It is the questions that take precedence and control the ideas, not so much the answers that do it. Is all of this part of Sahagún’s thinking and process, or is it otherwise? I believe it is part of her process.

I remember watching a Japanese priest paint calligraphy on a scroll. There was the very slow spreading of the large roll of paper on the floor, the careful laying of stones at the edges to hold it down, the diligent placement of the pot of ink, the examining of the brushes for what seemed like minutes on end, the contemplation of the paper with the priest’s head tilted first this way then that way, the seeming simply to reflect for a very long time on what was to be done, the slow dipping of the brush in the ink, the waiting, and waiting some more. Then, in a flash, only a few seconds, he completed the calligraphy. The whole thing was magnificent, all the more so as a result of seeing how he prepared himself for the task at hand. Likewise, in Luciano Fontana’s canvas slashing and the sumo wrestler’s decisive movements: there is the
setting-up of the perfect situation through contemplation and patience, then the lightning strikes that complete the process. So it seemed with this early work of Verónica Sahagún; and so, perhaps, it seems to be with these newest pieces. But maybe not; and it is this maybe-this/ maybe-that that fascinates me about her accomplishment. I believe she really does ask me to question and think.


There is a sense of purposeful formlessness — the chance I wondered about a moment ago — in her most recent work. I suspect, however, that this is not the result of flashes of action or luck. Rather, it has to have been painstaking calculation and fine tuning that brought about the sense of formlessness I perceive. Perfect chaos is never created through chaotic practices; instead, solely through calculation and care. Cage’s methods tell us that; there is nothing haphazard about them. I wonder, too, looking at a piece like Enjambre, for example, whether what we see frozen in time, references objects forming or ones devolving from some complex, more perfect state; after all, the title of this series is “Light TRANS forms.” Like nature, the works seem simultaneously to be both random and orderly in the extreme. Are the rose-like
shapes of Center and Hanging actually derived from nature, or is what we see, in fact, this artist’s fantasy about nature performing her quotidian tasks? Surely the juxtaposition of the waxy yellows and those touches of pink are the result of a keen eye mindfully understanding every detail of these exceedingly non-traditional materials, their combination, and their structuring.

There is a grand history behind all of this, such as the random-seeming, dangling loops of Eva Hesse’s Right After, 1969, which we encounter again, in spirit, at least, in Sahágun’s Untitled, 2003. Like the Hesse piece, the apparent chaos, perfectly executed here, is no accident and can only have been the result of precise placement of each bit of the unusual materials. Everything in this piece is deliberate; it exudes thoughtfulness while simultaneously seeming anarchic. The multi-sensory nature of beeswax — the beauty of its surface, its texture, its scent — have been explored by the likes of Medardo Rosso, Wolfgang Laib, and Joseph Beuys, but Sahágun takes it up once again and uses it in her own, highly subtle, fresh ways. John Chamberlain’s bound hunks of foam rubber are updated in a piece like Hanging, and the Cartesian order of Travel Inside II’s square format being challenged by the chaotic, random-looking piling-on of darker material, brings to mind earlier work of Robert Morris and Richard Serra. Sahagún takes what is already there and travels on with it along her own path.

Verónica Sahagún rises to all of these high levels of creativity and precedent in her current sculpture. She asks the right questions. The work looks good. It even smells good! It promotes both thought and the quest for thoughtfulness. It is difficult to imagine a young artist striving for higher goals. This sculpture is of very high order that allows viewers’ minds to expand, and expand, and expand.

 —Charles Boone, San Francisco, 1.15.06