Álvaro Urbano: TABLEAU VIVANT

Álvaro Urbano: TABLEAU VIVANT at SculptureCenter, New York, 2024.

Álvaro Urbano's recent exhibition Tableau Vivant at SculptureCenter breathes new life into Scott Burton's Atrium Furnishment, a seminal public artwork originally installed in Manhattan’s Equitable Center in 1989 until 2020, when it was taken apart and stored. Rescued from demolition, Urbano revisits these pieces to discuss memory, queerness, and the creation of a ruin in progress.

Scott Burton, working in the 70s and 80s before dying of AIDS-related complications, was a prominent minimalist artist who queered the New York minimalist scene with his sensual designs. Atrium Furnishment, crafted from verde larissa marble and pink onyx, common materials in his work, symbolized the rigid corporate life through its circular arrangement resembling a clock’s face marking 9 to 5. Urbano disrupts this reference by scattering these elements across the gallery floor, transforming the sculptural installation into a trompe l'oeil landscape echoing the foliage of Central Park’s Ramble. A historical cruising area for queer communities active since Burden’s time. 

The exhibit invites viewers to admire the beauty in contrast. The sensual organic designs erected in cold, hard marble, overcrowded by dainty botanical motifs in painted metal, a queer sensibility that challenges the original corporate symbolism of the atrium. The juxtapositions highlight themes of growth against decay, bouncing back and forth from organic to rigid. Above, a light installation mimics a city grid, with a timed choreograph of changing colors and brightness. At times, the room was bathed in a warm glow with stark shadows, and later, there was a white light reminiscent of an office cubicle. The play on lights keeps the room in constant flux, animating the inanimate, creating an interplay between visibility and obscurity, the private and public. 

- Cristobal Cosio* Final