BIOGRAPHICAL GEOLOGY: GISELA COLÓN PRESENTS HER FIRST RETROSPECTIVE IN PUERTO RICO

This March marked the opening of La montaña, el monolito (The Mountain, the Monolith) by Gisela Colón at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, where it will remain on view through August. Curated by Abdiel Segarra Ríos and Alexandra Méndez, the exhibition brings together sculptures, paintings, video, and installations in the artist’s first retrospective on the island.

From the outset, the installation establishes an unexpected dialogue between artwork and architecture: the aged wooden floor, stained a green reminiscent of the tropical forest, evokes the landscape of El Yunque and visually accompanies the works. This resonance was not planned, yet it reinforces one of the exhibition’s central axes: the organic connection between matter, territory, and experience.

The exhibition begins with Pinnacle (El Yunque) (1996), a painting that marks the first appearance of the monolith form in Colón’s practice. Created more than thirty years ago, this work inaugurates a sustained interest in Puerto Rico’s mountains as sources of energy, resilience, and life. As the curatorial text notes, the artist “develops a body of work that explores the interconnection of forces that—across different scales—compose and sustain the universe.”

The show continues with the Montañas de Puerto Rico (Mountains of Puerto Rico) series, composed of small paintings made with pigments extracted from the earth. Each condenses an autobiographical dimension: Jayuya, El Yunque, the Cordillera Central, and Cerro Maravilla appear not only as geological formations, but as territories charged with emotional memory. “I tie geology to personal stories,” the artist explains in conversation with Arte al Día, underscoring the fusion of landscape and biography.

The conceptual core unfolds in the monoliths, vertical forms that condense tensions between conflict and healing. Drawing from personal experiences marked by violence, Colón found in nature a model of transformation—a process through which the negative becomes vital energy. These sculptural bodies thus function as “a leap between conflict and healing,” where industrial materials, pigments, and natural elements act as carriers of energy.

In parallel, the pods introduce another dimension within her practice: organic structures that evoke the origin of life. Without electrical intervention, these works rely on light refraction to produce prismatic effects that recall natural processes. In the artist’s words, they represent “the beginning of life, the energy of the earth, the primordial energy.”

The exhibition also includes an earthwork composed of sand, stones, and materials collected in Puerto Rico, spreading across the museum floor as a cartography of the territory. This gesture responds to a consistent logic in her practice: each installation incorporates elements from its site, establishing a direct link between artwork and geography.

Presented in the artist’s native island, La montaña, el monolito (The Mountain, the Monolith) takes on a particular dimension. As the curatorial text states, the exhibition “reveals the profound ways in which the geography, geology, and primordial matter of the archipelago have shaped both her personal history and artistic practice.” The show not only surveys an international trajectory, but also proposes a return: a re-reading of the Puerto Rican landscape as origin, memory, and projection.

With a concise yet compelling selection of works, the exhibition offers a focused overview of more than three decades of production. In this intersection between the personal and the universal, matter—whether terrestrial or cosmic—emerges as a language capable of connecting scales of time, bodies, and territories.