Art is never reasonable. It is not logical and has no utilitarian value. In a world obsessed with efficiency, the role of the artist is to introduce friction. The artists in Natural Mystics employ magical and otherworldly thinking that gum-up the works and create this productive friction. Drawing from both the Rachofsky and the Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collections, the exhibition gathers works made in the shadow of the wreckage of empirical reason, at a time when the systems we were taught to trust have proven to be unreliable narrators of the present moment. The artists in the exhibition do not offer solutions, nor do they turn away from the present moment’s poverty and exhaustion. Instead, they turn upward and inward. Across a variety of media—from paintings to aquariums—they work from places beneath language and beyond the reach of consensus. In an age intoxicated by data and driven to rationalize every impulse, these artists choose instead to listen…to dreams, to omens, to the quiet murmur beneath the noise. Theirs is a different kind of rigor: one that resists legibility, that honors opacity, that draws from what cannot be charted. This is a queer knowledge-making. It does not justify itself. It offers ephemera as evidence.
Two of the most notable pieces in the show, by Mario Merz and Alex Da Corte, use scale and spectacle to offer a taste of the sublime. Merz’s iconic igloo work—8, 5, 3—meditates on the magic of the domed structure and numbers in the natural world. The igloo in all its mystery and charged energy acts as a touchstone—a guiding light, as it were, for the exhibition at large. Da Corte’s newly realized commission, The Guiding Light, that debuts in this exhibition, creates a pop-inflected reimagining of a childhood nursery rhyme. The work monumentalizes the tale of Humpty Dumpty, precariously perched upon a wall, holding its own guiding light, perhaps offering us a way out of this present moment. Da Corte’s figure is joined by Maurizio Cattelan’s drummer boy, perched alone on top of a wall, tapping out his own beat as a beacon that reverberates through the galleries —a pied piper leading us towards an undefined future.
Alongside Natural Mystics is the fourth iteration of WAREHOUSE:01, The Warehouse’s ongoing series of single artist exhibitions. Installed in the first gallery, Troy Brauntuch’s presentation of recent work, in dialogue with earlier work, makes for a fitting precursor to Natural Mystics. For over four decades, Brauntuch has explored the slippery role that images play in our understanding of the world. His works take time for the eye to decipher and often resist legibility. They exist in the deep threshold between perception and cognition, between I see and I understand. It is in this conjuring, or conjurable, space where the viewer lingers, left to create new meanings out of this ever-shifting, ever-vibrating realm where truth, time, information, and perceiver are in flux.
As Natural Mystics unfolds, the artists reckon with the world on different terms: intuitive, embodied, non-linear, organic. They operate as seers, not because they foretell the future, but because they feel and share what has been buried and what is becoming—climate collapse, algorithmic control, new understandings of the body, the disenchantment of life. These artists draw power from ancestral memory, the natural world, and ecstatic vision. What they offer is not escape, but spell work: gestures that resist commodification and truths that cannot be graphed. Here, art is not a mirror held to the world, but a portal—something to pass through and be changed by.
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