Elena Berriolo at Lo Spazio

Art in America, June, 2003 by Gregory Volk

Elena Berriolo is primarily known for her plush sculptures made of brocaded fabric fitted around underlying wooden structures. Rooted in pared-down abstraction, these works also suggest looming theatrical props; eccentric, to the point of dysfunctional, furniture; and the human (especially female) body. While Berriolo's signature fabrics recall the exquisite drapes, robes and upholstery of Renaissance Italy (Berriolo, by the way, is an Italian artist based in New York), such a historically freighted material takes on entirely new significance in her sculptures, with their peculiar admixture of abstraction and figuration, decor and the body.

For this modest exhibition in a small Lower East Side gallery, Berriolo presented an enticing selection of works on paper, which she calls drawings, and which both complement and elucidate her sculptural concerns. Instead of pencil, ink or any other medium normally associated with drawings, these works consist of fabric and thread on paper, with the fabric itself serving as a potent visual force. In one untitled piece from 2002, a mound of white, blue and gold fabric with a floral motif juts through an oval incision in the paper--one of many striking instances of three-dimensional sculptural forms emerging from two-dimensional fields, in this case with suggestions of swelling and birth. Both the top and bottom parts of the fabric mound have smooth, sloping shapes, but the middle has been pressed and indented to make a ragged crevasse or, more generally, a partially hidden interior. It's impressive how just a few adjustments of fabric in a small (6-by-9-inch) construction yield a complex piece that shuttles between surface splendor and private, enigmatic recesses.

Other works featuring small pieces of fabric and spare, sewn forms suggested clothing patterns in fashion design, but with a significant twist. Using just the rudiments of clothing, namely a scrap of fabric and a bit of thread, Berriolo conjured not the costume that covers the figure, but the figure itself, with playfulness and whimsy, but also with a sense of quest and discovery. In one of the works titled Sewn Red (2002), a gownlike piece of fabric only partly covers a figure, delineated from the neck down solely by austere stitching.

This "dress" doesn't fit by a long shot. There's an uncomfortable gap between couture and body, yet still the work has a gracefulness and wise repose, bordering on the beatific. With Sewn Yellow (2002), a swatch of fabric attached to the paper becomes the upper torso and shoulders for a silhouette--a figure rendered solely by three rippling patterns of stitching. It's a lovely work, but it's also a little bizarre, especially when one registers that the fabric resembles not an outer garment but inner viscera, perhaps some kind of hybrid organ, like a cross between the liver and the heart. In Berriolo's small works, heavy, opulent, luxurious fabric sheds its historical heft, as it becomes a multifaceted, richly evocative vehicle.