Anish Kapoor’s recent monumental works present themselves, above all, as objects of excess: formal articulations of emphases bearing on existence itself. This mysterious accumulation of objects, arrived at through inner and intellectual contradictions, can be said to generate an existential world of its own making. Indeed, there is no doubt that these new things, produced through a revisionist architecture resting on unconscious intuitions by an artist long inclined to give form to emptiness, harbor a hedonistic intimacy and mystery that spreads through space and, further, compresses it. What must first be addressed here, then, is an installative order in which an expanded perception, one that deepens into detail, undergoes continual transformation through the relation between the space occupied by these scaled objects and the space itself.

a utopian configuration: mount moriah at the gate of the ghetto 

The representational force of red, a color fetishized in Kapoor’s work and elevated into an element of pleasure, turns into a spatial game, and it is clear that this force corresponds, at bottom, to new psychic landscapes bound up with a monumental imagining diagnosed in the unconscious. Rendered in wax, silicone, resin, paint and pigment on fiberglass, this depiction of a mountain, titled Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto (2022), assumes a disquieting form: a psychoanalytic construction of action articulated onto the physical structure of the space as a suspended architectural element hanging from the ceiling. Inverted and suspended, this monumental object disrupts the play of perception and intervenes in emptiness as an element of violence, descending nearly to the ground and producing tension through a sensation that narrows the gaze.

Kapoor, who knows very well how to play with spatial emptiness, here transforms this strange yet striking incongruity, produced through a spatial emphasis designed in opposition to the architectural structure of the space, into a sublime object brought forth almost as if by prophetic mission, while at the same time turning the space itself into a sacred ceremonial ground. The monumental red mass, which thus carries the character of a kind of manifesto of emptiness, is turned into the object of an intellectual experience constructed so as to compress the space. This sublime red mass, the structure that pierces emptiness, likewise acquires a symbolic quality, one in which imbalances of power, personal upheavals and every kind of rationality are routed.

This configuration of Kapoor’s, which awakens unconscious desires, plainly exceeds practical existential action. Mount Moriah here becomes a representational otherworld born of the conflict of the space-object dialectic, now a utopian configuration that breaks free of the determinants of an absolute cycle and sets perception in motion. It is as though the summit, sagging toward the ground under a loaded weight resembling an inventory of anguish, were a monumental illusion harboring fragmented realities and devastated emotional clusters. And, as though akin to spiritual visions, it rests on a strange insight that bends the space and renders it mysterious. It is as though, through its flowing and dripping liquids enveloping the unconscious, it organizes disparate sensations into a narrative order cloaked in red. It possesses an intricate shell and appears, incorrigibly, in a striking red-black guise.

mountain and red as a metaphor of unease

Anish Kapoor, who draws us close to the unreliable world of a psychoanalytic complexity, aims to problematize the relational agency of this monumental object-image within space by permeating the collective totality of eroding, ambiguous perceptions. In this setting, where violence is positioned at the center as a utopian element, he interprets red as a kind of metaphor of unease, one that either operates according to the qualified ritual of a narcissistic enchantment or corresponds to aggressive drives. For this reason, this imposing red form, in which components such as trauma, existence and violence generate new thresholds of perception, also conceals the violence-steeped, conflictual spirit of an intense metaphysical foreboding of life. This allegorical red linguistic ceremony thus confronts us, by way of the inexpressible things into which the ritual of irrational thought has wrought a shapeless transformation, with an original language of self-location and a power of parodic utterance. Here, evidently, an original color of abstracted traumas has been made to generate a mysterious and dark language.

The monumental scale and the effect of sublimity in Kapoor’s works, taking on a spiritual guise, also bring to light the intellectual aggression of an effort of feeling that persists under the command of the gaze. It seems certain that this uncontrollable, exceptional form, the product of this brutal opposition between installative structure and space, is an imaginary configuration that generates a perception of tension and, no less, calls into question its relationality with other things, and that it articulates onto this an exciting fictional world. This faltering architectural element, appearing as an amorphous, hard and motionless rock lodged within a taut psychic imaginary charged with poststructuralist characterizations, of course carries within it a powerful textual rhetoric. Precisely for this reason it possesses a magical aura that whets and estranges the gaze. In its hegemonic aspect, and in its spiritual dimension generating an arrogant gravitational pull, it is like an apocalyptic vision boldly undertaken…