Outside of Jilotepec de Molina Enríquez, Mexico, last summer, immersed in nature’s rhythms, María Korol devised the phantasmagoric bestiary “Bichos” (Critters). Across twenty-one paintings and drawings, the Atlanta-based Argentinean artist’s syrupy brushwork seeds peculiar episodes between anthropomorphized moths, horses, scorpions, and other beings—including the occasional contorted human.
A visit to the historic Biblioteca Palafoxiana in Puebla, Mexico, catalyzed the faunal content. There, Korol pored over Jesuit German scientist Athanasius Kircher’s elaborately illustrated Arca Noë (Noah’s Ark, 1675), an absurd attempt to schematize the biblical vessel’s creaturely accommodations, and Musurgia Universalis (The Universal Musical Art, 1650), a proto music-theory manual partly devoted to the utterances of animals. Korol was once a dancer, so sound, melody, and choreography permeate the surreal “Bichos.”
In a pair of sibling oils, ¡Adentro! (Inside, all works 2023) and ¡Afuera! (Outside), the artist’s familiarity with modern dance’s occultish somatics births soirees between a chimeric giraffe, frog, chicken, and more, whose anatomies are at once aberrant and credible. Standing upright on hind legs, with several in high heels, their stacked joints improbably obey muscular and gravitational physics. Such kinetic scenes are rambunctious and gamy: think Genieve Figgis’s Victorian ghouls exiting David Cronenberg’s telepod in The Fly (1986). Smaller, more illustrative pieces depicting animals jamming—a snake on bass, a cricket on trumpet, a cat on cello—recall pages from Book of Imaginary Beings, 1957, by fellow Argentineans Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero (who was also a dancer).
Korol’s 2021 solo outing at this gallery, “Rango de mareas” (Tidal Range), employed abstraction as a discordant dual metaphor for erasure (of silenced populations and desaparecidos) and subversion (a technology to camouflage and protect the vulnerable). While overtly more whimsical, “Bichos” oozes anxieties about insides and outsides, concepts that rhyme with Lygia Clark’s early 1960s interactive sculptures exploring interior and exterior psychological borders that she, notably, called Bichos. Via anthropomorphization, Korol has injected these bestial tableaus with humanity’s patently unfunny pecking orders of class, gender, and race.
