![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Gisela-Colon-The-Future-is-Now-25-Foot-Parabolic-Monolith-Iridium-2020-Desert-X-AlUla-Saudi-Arabia.-Photo_-Lance-Gerber.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tThat shift in scale\u2014from home to the cosmos, from the specific to the universal\u2014is at the core of her work. Or so I came to realize visiting the exhibition, which occupies three cave-like galleries that grow darker as you get deeper into her world.<\/p>\n
\n\tCol\u00f3n\u2019s monoliths are certainly sublime, but they are also a little Burning Man, a little manicure. Their sparkly, smooth, almond shapes look exactly like big, beautiful fingernails. I was itching to figure out why that bothered me and if it should. After all, I do love a sparkly manicure; I am typing with one right now.<\/p>\n
\n\tPages from Rosalind Galt\u2019s book Pretty <\/em>went flashing through my mind. The book had already done the work of making me distrust that reflex \u2014 the one that assumes prettiness is a symptom of shallowness. That logic, Galt convinced me, is misogynistic.<\/p>\n \n\tOf course, pretty things can still certainly be shallow. But happily, in Col\u00f3n\u2019s case, looking deeper proves rewarding. Like many abstract artists before her, Col\u00f3n, who was born in Canada to a Puerto Rican father and now lives in Los Angeles, is enamored of picturing the world in its most fundamental form, and maybe even evoking something like the universal. Her materials include those most basic elements of the earth\u2014geology\u2014and her forms borrow from totems, obelisks, prehistoric megaliths, and Indigenous Caribbean zeniths. They feel both of the future and of the past.<\/p>\n \n\tBut here is where the latter day Light and Space artist diverges most decisively from her forebears: she never falls for the fallacy that her materials are actually abstract. They have histories, and these histories play a role in her meaning making. In our Anthropocene era where nature and culture can no longer be neatly cleaved, she knows that sublime beauty and terrible violence too often go hand-in-hand.<\/p>\n \n\tIn fact, an early experience with gun violence is also part of what drew Col\u00f3n to her signature shape\u2014which juts firmly and decisively into the air\u2014as well as to materials only possible by way of the Military Industrial Complex. Light and Space was always caught up in said complex too, as a recent show at the Palm Springs Art Museum memorably explicated. But it rarely acknowledged this entanglement as fraught; Col\u00f3n brings self-consciousness to the dilemma.<\/p>\n \n\tFor the most part, Col\u00f3n\u2019s tensions come to life on the wall labels, upon reading the titles and materials. But one work stands as an exception: ESTRUCTURA TOT\u00c9MICA (PIEDRAS CONTRA BALLAS, BAYAM\u00d3N INCANDESCENTE)<\/em>, 2022, is a smooth, shiny, sparkly curve perched Brancusi-like on a slender column. Made of clear Plexiglass, the column is filled with layers of pulverized materials that were also used to make the curved form\u2014red earth and desert sand, but also ground up bullets. Striated in raw form, they\u2019re still beautiful, but there is something more rugged about them. The title, translated as \u201crocks against bullets,\u201d drives the point home.<\/p>\n \n\tOn view concurrently with the MAC exhibition is a sculpture Col\u00f3n made for El Yunque, the Puerto Rican rain forest\u2014a natural wonder that was also a testing site for Agent Orange. It was also the muse for her very first monolith, in 1996. A spire that appears as both mountain and missile greets visitors to the verdant forest. It boasts a surprisingly smooth gradient from lime green all the way to deep periwinkle\u2014amplified reflections of the plants and the sky. Somehow, the lime parts manage to follow you as you move around. And it matters that these more golden hues haunt you: the title, Rivers of Gold and Dust (Parabolic Monolith Aurus Pulvum)<\/em>, 2017\u201325, refers to the violence Indigenous people experienced on the archipelago as the Spanish extracted gold from Puerto Rico\u2019s rivers. Some of the minerals in its pigments come from Saharan sands that blow their way to the Caribbean every year, where they nourish the forest\u2019s soils.<\/p>\n \n\tIn Col\u00f3n\u2019s hands, the universal and the specific\u2014but also abstraction\u2019s long held tensions between the analytical and the spiritual\u2014fold in on one another. Sometimes though, the folding feels fluid where friction ought to be. At times, I found myself craving more visible traces of some of the work\u2019s central tensions. But then I realized, the smoothness is <\/em>the friction. The glamor never went down easily for me because it shouldn\u2019t, because violence and beauty should not sit together as seamlessly as they do in Col\u00f3n\u2019s sculptures. But of course, they go down just as seamlessly in the world\u2014as visitors to El Yunque well know. The horrors under the monoliths\u2019 shimmering surfaces remind us to look at the land, then look deeper.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/aia-reviews\/gisela-colon-shimmering-obelisk-el-yunque-giza-1234780139\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Gisela-Colon-Rios-de-Oro-y-Polvo-Parabolic-Monolith-Aurus-Pulvum-2017-2025-El-Yunque-Rainforest-Rio-Grande-Puerto-Rico.-Photo_-Adriana-Vazquez-Acevedo.jpg?w=1024″] When I learned that Gisela Col\u00f3n was having a retrospective at Museo de Arte Contempor\u00e1neo de Puerto Rico (MAC), I leapt at the chance to check it out. I knew that I felt deeply conflicted about her work, and thought the survey would offer a chance to sort out my thoughts. Before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1870631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1870631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1870631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1870631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1870631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Gisela-Colon-Eternity-Now-30-Foot-Ellipsoidal-Dome-Iridium-Gold-2021-The-Pyramids-of-Giza-Egypt.-Photo_-Ammr-Abd-Rabbo.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Gisela-Colon-La-Montana-El-Monolito-at-MAC.-Installation-view.-Photo_-Karina-Rivera.-1.jpg?w=400\")
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