Ilaria Bona at Desire Feuerle - Cologne, Germany

Art in America, March, 1993 by Lisa Zieger

"Darwin's Journey" was the first solo show in Germany of Italian-born Ilaria Bona, who lives in Cologne. The title suggests her interest in natural science: in this work, Bona posits parallels between the microscopic and the visible worlds and between vegetable and animal phenomena and human practices. In a text for the exhibition, she compared the procreative activities of people and plants, writing, "What we humans normally do in secret, veiled by shame and emotion, is exposed to the light of day by [the gluttonous swelling and multiplication of] algae. . . ."

Her installation consisted of five botanical drawings in pencil on painted wood, 45 paper collages and six large sculptures of wax, pipe cleaner or metal - autonomous works subtly yet tightly related to one another through a complex repertoire of organic motifs. The pencil drawings on wood - of mussels, orchids and Venus's-flytraps - modestly intended as precise scientific records of exotica, were the progeny of that near-extinct species: an artist who can draw as beautifully as she can think. The collages, which covered an entire wall, serve for Bona as both working notebook and exegesis of her larger pieces. They are composed of photocopied images culled from early natural-history books, back issues of National Geographic and old advertisements, realigned in unexpected, often humorous relationships via Bona's tendril-like pencil and watercolor ciphers, grids and crosses.

In one collage, a cutout of a black-and-white ad showing a woman's-blissful smile was surmounted by the ominous teeth of a horse, a shark and a lion, and crowned by a delicate pencil rendering of weeds. In another, a 19th-century drawing of a honeycomb was encircled by Bona's flowerlike rendition of the ovaries of a queen bee. As an ensemble, the collages constituted an encyclopedia of the strange images discovered in the natural world - ostriches, rabbits, fish, snails, potatoes - when it is subjected to intense scrutiny.

Bona's attraction to this strangeness is epitomized by her sculptures, which crossbreed natural forms with man-made and mix the scientific and the sensuous. A pair of monumental white wax Earrings, draped from wall to floor, would seem from their title to be artifacts, yet they look as much like strange vegetative growths. Two floor sculptures consist of profuse wax-covered wooden stalks that rise from a plinth, pistil-like, to terminate in wax balls; these were inspired by the growth distortions that resulted from botanical research on plant response to gravity. Bona's ultimate implement is an impossibly elongated pair of iron Scissors, slyly alluding, in their exaggeration, to Rosemarie Trockel's famous Endless Stockings. For all her interest in science, Bona creates objects that withstand purely formal and esthetic scrutiny; the sensory appeal of her work takes it far beyond the illustrative.