In this essay, Mónica Amor analyzes the contribution that the work by Gego, Reticulárea, has made to contemporary art. She claims that Reticulárea is a radical attack on the way architecture defines space, as well as the conventions of sculpture, specifically those involving mass, volume, and scale. In Amor’s view, Reticulárea formulates an affective and perceptive geometry due to its antihierarchical, fractured, heterogeneous, mutant, and rhizomatic nature that consistently undermines ideal structures. Reticulárea therefore forges a new notion of the viewer as one who forms part of the work’s space, and as such, has only a fragmented vision. The work Reticulárea also partakes of Greg Lynn’s notion of “monstrous architecture”: an architecture of the “proximate and non-appropriated.” Amor reads Reticulárea in terms of the feminine, since it destabilizes the authoritarian and monumental structure of patriarchal architecture.

Venezuelan curator and art critic Mónica Amor has studied Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912–1994), a Venezuelan artist of German origin, and her work, particularly Reticulárea, in essays such as “Gego: desafiando estructuras,” Poliéster, vol. 4, no. 14, Mexico City, and “Entre espacios: la Reticulárea y su lugar en la historia,” in Iris Peruga et al., Gego. Obra completa 1955–1990 (Caracas: Fundación Cisneros, Fundación Gego, Fundación Museo de Bellas Artes of Caracas, 2003), and others. Before providing an in-depth analysis of Reticulárea as a powerful whole, Amor discusses all the contingencies surrounding the work, including the various installations and transformations effected by Gego, all of which constitute the groundwork for her theory. While Amor studies Reticulárea in terms of the “rhizome”—a concept formulated by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and later used to discuss Gego’s work by critics Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas, Iris Peruga, Julieta González, and the architect Christian Thiel, who was the first one to point out this analogy—she makes use of other concepts as well to deepen and enrich her vision, and to place it in a political and social framework. The first of these other concepts is the notion of “the monstrous,” developed by architect and philosopher Greg Lynn in the essay “Body Matters” in Folds, Bodies & Blobs: Collected Essays (Brussels: La lettre volée, 1998), in which she posits the notion of body deformation—viscosity—as an alternative corporeal scheme. The second notion that Amor uses comes from feminist writers Elizabeth Grosz, (“Architecture of Excess,” Anymore, ed. Cynthia C. Davidson; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000) and Rosi Braidotti, (“Mothers, Monsters and Machines,” in Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory; New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Grosz proposes the structures of waste as a radical alternative to patriarchal conceptions of space and time; and Braidotti makes use of the notion of the female body as “monstrosity” in the sense of deviation from the norm and as a mutation. Thanks to these concepts, Mónica Amor’s essay provides an original perspective that reformulates previous critical visions of Reticulárea. Fragments of this essay were selected for publication in the bilingual book Desenredando la red. La Reticulárea de Gego. Una antología de respuestas críticas / Untangling the Web: Gego’s Reticulárea, An Anthology of Critical Response, organized by María Elena Huizi and Ester Crespin, currently in the process of being published by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Fundación Gego, Caracas.