Cathy de Monchaux at Mitchell-Innes & Nash and Sean Kelly - New York, New York - Brief Article

Art in America, Dec, 1999 by Carol Kino

Cathy de Monchaux, a nominee for the 1998 Turner Prize, is known for sculptures and installations that marry intricate handcraft with the theatricality of Goth rock and the fetishistic zeal of a Victorian pornographer. For her second New York solo, she filled two galleries with an impressive assortment of mostly new work, much of it finished on-site.

A typical piece was Sovereign, at Sean Kelly: a copper and brass fretwork, edged with spikes and screwed to a long, rectangular gray canvas, writhes with mink-edged orifices that are spread wide by brass talons to reveal vulvalike masses of coiled, crinkled pink leather. (These furrows also resemble intestines or brains.) Protruding from each orifice is something that resembles a flayed tail or penis. The leather is dusted with white chalk.

Such hermaphroditic combinations seem central to de Monchaux's work, which is often oblique even though its craftsmanship fascinates and its mythological allusions are rich. At Kelly, similar combinations turned up in Maud's Pink--a serpent-shaped floor sculpture whose glistening skin bursts with tiny furred wounds that sprout pink tonguelike protuberances. These nubs, which also resemble eyeless heads, summon up thoughts of birth and sexual metamorphosis, while the wounds themselves recall stigmata. (To make the piece, de Monchaux stitched gathered suede onto a wire armature and burnished its surface with wax, graphite and chalk.)

At Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Mordant Rapture (also the title of the show) consists of a crinkled rose-colored heart that erupts into a barnacle spouting mink, hair and coils of thread-wrapped leather. Both galleries displayed the edition Mayflower (Warbride): a slender silver frog (ancient symbol of genesis) nestles within an engorged, pillowy vulva form, its forelegs crossed against its breast in ecstasy.

Both also showed photographs--something of a departure for this artist. At Kelly, a large light box offered a body of water against a pale sky; in the foreground, a black hook dangles Prom what looks like a clothes-line. (From afar, the tonalities look nearly gray, but a close look reveals benday dots of color.) At the uptown venue, one piece involved two pairs of light boxes that picture a flower-filled meadow beneath a glowering sky. Between them is a brass grate shaped like a spider's web; at its heart lies another baroquely detailed vulva form.

Yet in the end it was perhaps the austerely minimalistic Lap Top at Mitchell-Innes & Nash that characterized the artist's esthetic most deftly: blocks of white-enameled wood sternly bolstered with hard red-velvet upholstery formed a narrow, pewlike keep for the gallery assistant. Like all de Monchaux's work, it's marked by devoted craftsmanship and a cruelly rigorous sensibility so exuberantly excessive that it seems slyly humorous.