Inigo Manglano-Ovalle at Max Protetch - a show by the multimedia artist

Lovely, lonely clouds have wandered across the field of contemporary art recently. Last summer, to derive architecture from atmosphere, the facade of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio's Blur Building projected lake water through scores of tiny jets creating a foggy mist that transformed the media pavilion at Switzerland's Expo 2002 into a cloud hovering over Lake Neuchatel. Artist Inigo Manglano-Ovalle recently reversed this formula by constructing a large-scale fiberglass sculpture modeled after a 30-kilometer-long cumulonimbus thundercloud. It was suspended in the gallery about a foot above the floor and reached almost to the ceiling. Resplendent from its allover patchwork of titanium alloy foil, Cloud Prototype No. 1 hovered at the center of "Purgatory," a New York showing of Manglano-Ovalle's new multimedia work. The eye-catching volume will reappear this month as part of the opening exhibition at the Zaha Hadid-designed Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati.

The implications of Cloud Prototype No. 1 were amplified in related art works elsewhere in the gallery. Cloud Painting, a poem inscribed in white letters on a sky-blue background, pithily described an anthropomorphic crying cloud. The other text painting, Time, with a passage from the Bhagavad Gita written in red Sanskrit script on a yellow field, added a dose of fatalism. The label noted that the translation, "I am time, destroyer of worlds," was famously misquoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer in July 1945 as, "I am become death: the destroyer of worlds." Storm Hangar, a two-minute DVD loop rendered and animated by architect Douglas Garofalo, pans the circumference of a digital thundercloud adrift in a World War II-era zeppelin hangar. Manglano-Ovalle's other new video, Accelerator, was the show's most direct portrayal of the continually frustrated human impulse to transcend our physical limitations. An overturned red Lincoln Continental, muddied and battered, is fruitlessly spun on the concrete by a joyless group of kids. The top-heavy form loses its familiarity and in turn evokes the cloud sculpture, reiterating the concretization of dimensionality and space. Only the wispy Dante theme stated in the show's title rang false. Manglano-Ovalle's objects and videos are richly emotive and do not need the added conceit of the Divine Comedy.

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