The Artist Whose Shimmering Obelisks Are Cropping Up Around The World

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Gisela Colón's Puerto Rico retrospective turns abstraction into a record of place, violence, and scale

At Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico in San Juan, a retrospective of Gisela Colón is reframing her gleaming“monoliths” as more than seductive objects. The exhibition traces a body of work the artist has been developing since 1996, and it places her polished, towering forms inside a larger conversation about geology, colonial history, and the technologies that shape both beauty and harm.

Colón, who was born in Canada to a Puerto Rican father and lives in Los Angeles, works with aerospace carbon fiber, Plexiglass, and custom pigments she makes from organic matter and site-specific minerals. The results are visually arresting: surfaces that shift as a viewer moves, catching and releasing light in ways that make the sculptures feel almost alive. But the retrospective insists that their shimmer is only the beginning of the story.

One work,“MONOLITO PARABÓLICA HEMATITA (Tierra de Substrato, Arecibo, Puerto Rico),” uses hematite sourced from her family's land in Arecibo. The mineral gives soil and rock a red cast, and it is also found on Mars and the moon, allowing the sculpture to move between the intimate and the cosmic without losing its grounding in Puerto Rico. Another piece,“ESTRUCTURA TOTÉMICA (PIEDRAS CONTRA BALLAS, BAYAMÓN INCANDESCENTE),” incorporates red earth, desert sand, and ground-up bullets inside a clear Plexiglass column, making the work's material beauty inseparable from the violence embedded in its components.

That tension is central to Colón's practice. Her forms recall totems, obelisks, and prehistoric megaliths, but they also resist the idea that abstraction can be detached from history. In the exhibition, that argument becomes especially pointed in a sculpture made for El Junque, which references the forest's history as a testing site for Agent Orange. Another work,“Rivers of Gold and Dust (Parabolic Monolith Aurus Pulvum),” points to Spanish extraction of gold from Puerto Rico's rivers and to Indigenous violence.

The retrospective suggests that Colón's work is most compelling when it is understood not as pure formalism, but as a material language shaped by land, memory, and the afterlife of empire. Her sculptures may appear futuristic, even celestial, yet they remain stubbornly tied to the earth beneath them.

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