Dario Robleto
Frye Art Museum
- Nancy Stoaks -
Dario Robleto, An Instinct Toward Life Only A Phantom Can Know, 2007–08; 19th c. wedding dress, mourning dresses, cut colored paper, homemade paper (cotton, ground passion flower), 19th c. mourning fabric and ribbon, cast black amber, carved ivory, silk, tulle, typeset; dimensions variable; Courtesy the artist; photo by Adam L. Weintraub
Daughters Of Wounds And Relics, 2006; hair braid made of stretched and curled audio tape recordings of the last known Union Civil War soldier’s voice and the last known Confederate Civil War widow’s voice, homemade paper (pulp made from sweetheart letters written by soldiers who did not return from various wars, sepia, bone dust from every bone in the body), lace and fabric from mourning dresses, hair flower braided by a Civil War widow, colored paper, silk, milk paint, ink stained ash, glass, typeset; 30 x 19 x 3 ¼ inches; Collection of Jeannie and Mickey Klein; Promised gift to the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin
Dust from every bone in the body, letters written to sweethearts by soldiers who never returned from the battlefield…appearing again and again in Dario Robleto’s work, such elegiac phrases and materials are representative of the artist’s ongoing project as historian, poet and self-styled alchemist. Robleto’s work is featured in two simultaneous exhibitions at Frye Art Museum: Alloy of Love, a ten-year survey, and Heaven is Being a Memory to Others, a site-specific installation that includes pieces from the Frye’s collection.
Alloy of Love, the first official survey of Robleto’s work to date, brings together various homages to idols of pop music and more recent narratives about an anonymous, time-traveling soldier. In his early work, the artist melted or otherwise destroyed vinyl recordings of Billie Holiday and others, transforming these objects into meditations on love and loss. When, in 2001, Robleto began addressing the subject of war in his work, his practice of mixology—of merging and altering materials—was well-suited to his collection of obscure battlefield remnants. In Daughters of Wounds and Relics, for example, letters to a lost soldier become the pulp for homemade paper; recordings of a Civil War soldier and widow are stretched to resemble human hair drawn into a braid. The result is a simple but loaded composition, referencing improvised mourning customs that may arise out of loss and the endless search for healing. Robleto rescues these relics, giving life to stories that are all too often forgotten.
As an exhibition, however, Alloy of Love falls short of the strength of its individual parts. Robleto’s romanticism is better suited to smaller presentations: those that can embrace the theatricality and deliberate sequencing so key to the viewer’s experience of his work. Proof of this lies in adjacent galleries of the Frye where, in Heaven is Being a Memory to Others, Robleto’s work permeates spaces traditionally reserved for the museum’s original collection. Here, with darkened walls and minimal lighting, Robleto dramatically intersperses a select group of paintings from the collection with his own work, which responds to the history of the museum’s founders, Charles and Emma Frye.
Emma Frye, a largely anonymous figure, is of special interest to the artist. Akin to Robleto’s lost soldier, she is the anchor upon which he constructs a narrative of love and longing. An Instinct Toward Life Only A Phantom Can Know is one poignant example. Responding to Emma’s documented miscarriage and childlessness, a bride appears eerily flanked by two figures in mourning gowns. Surrounding them on all sides are paintings of mothers and children, including Friedrich August von Kaulbach’s Portrait of the Artist’s Family, which hangs opposite the bride. These curatorial decisions poetically reimagine the Frye collection through Emma’s eyes. It is here, in the darkness of Heaven, that Robleto’s meditations on nostalgia and immortality have their greatest power.
Nancy Stoaks is a writer living in Seattle.