Raquel Montilla Higgins at Nexus

Raquel Montilla Higgins's recent exhibition, titled "Vestiges," comprised 13 new works made with torn pieces of singed paper, ink and linen thread. These almost white-on-white abstractions had a lingering and somewhat haunting aura of resilience, even though their physical fragility suggested that they could disintegrate at any moment. An elegiac sadness also emanated from them, so one was not surprised to learn that Higgins made them in response to the tragedies of Sept. 11.

The one work most obviously bound up with that day by title and image was Towers. It consisted of two parallel "towers," each approximately 8 feet tall, made with many horizontal loops of stiff white linen thread jutting out from the wall in stacks, like the floors of a building. The whole thing might have been invisible were it not for the way it was lit, for each loop, mounted perpendicularly to the wall, cast tear-and leaflike oval and circular shadows that overlapped to define the shape of the phantom forms.

The show's largest work and two smaller related untitled pieces were composed entirely of irregularly shaped pieces of slightly burnt white papers placed in three groupings; they cascaded across 27 feet of an adjacent white wall. The intent was to make one think of the myriad papers that fell from the World Trade Center after the jets struck. Had Higgins used actual correspondence and invoices, this work would have been more specific to its occasion but also jarringly journalistic, lacking any of the poetic charge it had as constituted. In fact, if one did not know what inspired it, the work might well have brought to mind the movements of butterflies in flight or a school of fish swimming in orchestrated movement.

Higgins's esthetic is careful and considered, and the delicacy of her touch (with no trace of sentimentality) is decidedly feminine. In this show, the tactility of her materials invited the viewer to consider how the pieces were made or even wonder how the work would come across if cast in bronze or another more permanent material. Perhaps the strength of this evanescent body of work was that it caused one to ponder its inspirational source and then, however momentarily, to forget it.

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group