Ronald Gonzalez

By Matthew Friday

Our bodies are the means through which we enter into a relation with sculpture. Scale and proportion are weighed against the knowledge we possess of our own bodies and the bodies of others. Irregularities in figurative sculpture are experienced as deformities, mutations and mutilations; impossible anatomies spawn inevitable comparison to our own flesh. Is it the unavoidable dissimilarity that makes these comparisons monstrous, or is their something more terrifying at work in our moment of recognition? How can we recognize ourselves in an image? What purpose does this recognition serve? Who, or what is it that looks back in this moment of recognition? Are we attracted or repelled by these blurry moments of identification? Ronald Gonzalez's figurative sculptures extend these lines of inquiry. Children play with dolls, and in their play they often cannot distinguish between the doll and what it represents. What do children know, or rather, what are we no longer able to recognize in this act of mistaken identity? We are gripped by a pathological need to project our image upon all we see, as if the multiplication of our reflection will enable us to dominate all we view. Ronald Gonzalez's sculptures bear witness to this uncanny truth; bits of hair and bone transform and blur into features. Skeletal armatures, fragments of wire and bits of debris communicate obscure gestures and mouth silent words. Sigmund Freud was quick to recognize that representations of the figure such as dolls, automatons and sculptures emerge from the repertory of the uncanny. These figures encompass a perverse form of symbolic transposition; in a series of seemingly infinite repetitions, the line between inanimate and animate, between the living and the dead, is made porous and arbitrary. Can we conceive of these sculptures as mirrors, not in the sense that they present us with an accurate image, but that, like all reflections they encompass a return of something disturbingly unfamiliar, which wrapped in the garment of our own flesh, contains a presage of death. Do we anticipate the return of the dead when we gaze into a mirror or when we become frightened by the shadows we cast? Is it our double, made strange by distance and time, carrying a burden of horrible knowledge that stares out? Can we imagine a world without reflection or representation, a world where it would be impossible to tell which side of the mirror we were on? Like mirrors and shadows, Ronald Gonzalez's figures announce the return of our own image; a distressingly animate double cobbled together from decaying fragments and forgotten waste. For the doll, the automaton and the cadaver, nothing is left to chance; causality is rigidly determined. Although we might endow these sculptures with a sense of agency and endeavor to see them as reflections of ourselves, it is far more dangerous to imagine the opposite.