CURA.

Reaching the seabed is a difficult feat, even more so when the ocean is far away; “After Nature” does not wish to emulate the bottom of the sea, but to bring us closer to it. The artist Claudia Comte has created an environment of forms and images with which we can open ourselves to the underwater world, asking: What is a coral? Can our eyes really capture the multiple light signals emitted by the animals on the seabed? Why do corals disappear and what are the consequences?

The artist has divided the exhibition space into two worlds: the world of light, of corals and reefs; and the world of night, where our eyes can barely mitigate the circumstances. A large wall painting unifies these two worlds, like waters in the sea. Ripples resembling waves, as well as the frequencies of wind and ocean currents, circumscribe the exhibition. Their vivid, almost artificial colours are inspired by the bioluminescent signals that many forms of marine life emit to communicate.

In the first room, the light illuminates a series of corals carved in wood, wood from fallen trees collected on the island of Jamaica where the artist was in residency to understand the complex process of coral regeneration. Comte has always been interested in wood. In her native Vallis, Switzerland, she works with trees and their memories. It was in Jamaica that she decided to unify for the first time her passion for forests with her fascination for the ‘jungles of the sea’, coral reefs. The wooden corals speak of the beauty of their forms, of their diversity. They also allude to the interconnectedness of everything that makes up a biotope. In the second room representing the seabed, corals reemerge translated into a digital animation, into a technical and meticulous study of their forms.

“Comte’s site-specific installation brings together characteristic aspects of his work: mural painting as a method to disorient the senses in space and wooden sculptures; it also introduces the intelligence of underwater life, such as the way fish use bioluminescence to send signals through their skin, and the presence of corals as a wake-up call for humans to learn to respect the ocean,” explains Chus Martínez, curator of the exhibition.

Furthermore, a video is projected in the second room, described by Martínez as “a new family of digitally animated corals, they form and un-form, offering us, mischievously, a new image of their morphology. These corals are the characters of a story they would like to tell the world.” This exhibition is the result of TBA21–Academy’s invitation for Claudia Comte to undertake a residency at Alligator Head Foundation in 2019. The foundation manages the East Portland Fish Sanctuary, one of Jamaica’s largest ocean conservation spaces, housing a major coral research and regeneration center. There, Comte began developing this series of sculptures as well as an underwater sculpture garden. During the residency, she collaborated with coral specialist Colin Foord of Miami’s Coral Morphologic of Miami renowned marine biologist Dr. David Gruber professor at Baruch College CUNY, New York. Claudia has also collaborated with the Computer Science Department of the University of Freiburg, Germany to create the animation that is represented on the dark room.

This new series of wooden corals originates from her time on the island, where sculptors from the local Portland community contributed to their sanding and polishing. Comte’s work focuses on corals, one of the most spectacular life forms in existence, the result of a symbiotic relationship that generates great quantities of oxygen, and whose extinction would have a profound impact on all planetary life. The exhibition is completed with a new digital piece by Claudia Comte that will be premiered on the digital platform st_age.