Pepon Osorio

by Donald Goddard

The family and workers are real, the possessions are real, and so essentially are the desks and their accoutrements. It is impossible to escape the entanglements of all these images and objects. They form a pervasive consciousness, from which there is no escape, though much of this three-dimensional collage--the vacation and sports pictures, the ordering of everything toward solution, etc.--is about escape. But then even pictures of Allen Iverson playing basketball, or of hotels in Puerto Rico, double back on themselves. They are parts of the walls that surround everything, including the cubic cage at the center containing the objects that form a life, lives. It is like one of Dante's circles of hell, in which punishment, the wailing and gnashing of teeth, is played out by the children.

Osorio has added to this scene an army of ceramic figurines, surrounding and almost invading the desks, of plastic toy figures and snow domes (those transparent plastic-enclosed scenes upon which snow seems to fall when you turn them over and back), and, on one wall, cartoons from The New Yorker concerning the vagaries of middle-class "American" families. The effect is to further crowd out reality, that is, the reality of the individual lives being lived, particularly those of the brother and sister, which have already been crowded out by the "reality" of displaced objects and hope and fantasy and talk. There is literally no room left for the people involved except as it is materialized in the ambience, in the categorization of files and boxes, pictures and regulations. But then, it is also clear in this mélange that everyone has their own lives, which intertwine with each other in ultimately unpredictable ways. What is on the walls and desks, in the cage and computers, is separate but also bound together, however artificially.

And the binding appears over and over again in doubling (as my wife Helen pointed out). The statuettes are often pairs. Double images appear on the wall: the two sides of a heart, a Rorschach drawing. Within the multitude is a powerful sense of binary structure: two people talking, brother and sister, male and female, brown skin and white skin, themes that have been present before in Las Twines (1999) and other works by Osorio. Conversely, coupling produces profusion, proliferation, but twos also contain ones. It represents procreation, creativity, but also the inevitable and singular despair of the individual.

Donald Goddard © 2002