New York artist Maria Berrío’s intricate collage technique animates her works’ surfaces, making them crackle with energy. The pictures are patchworks, assembled from bits and pieces that feel of this world but also improbable, as if held together by magic.
“A Cloud’s Roots” by Maria Berrío, 2018. Collage with Japanese papers and watercolor paint, 80 by 96 inches.
Unusually large for collage — the widest is 10 feet across — the images are constructed on stretched canvases, like paintings. Most of the surface is covered with paper, either painted or printed, although Berrío has drawn in some details such as faces and hands. In “Flower Mirror Water Moon,” a woman wearing a floral-print shirt sits facing the viewer. She gingerly holds a bird in her hands, as if she’s just rescued it. Through the open door at her back, we see another woman sitting on a brightly striped bed, gazing out the window at a mountain landscape. The story is ambiguous, but the image draws our eye from inside to outside, from the delicate wild bird, through doors and windows to the stolid mountains.
Most of the landscapes are arid and golden, populated with gnarled trees. The press release notes that Berrío, an immigrant from Colombia, was inspired by the dragon’s blood tree, which has adapted to the dry and rocky soil on an island off Yemen. I was struck, however, by how much the images evoke the American West, another seemingly inhospitable place that became and continues to be a site of migration and conquest in the pursuit of dreams.
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