María Korol
Tierra adentro (Hinterland)
February 28 - April 12, 2025
215 N Limestone
“... behind the tale one caught glimpses of a savage and uncouth life: tents of horsehide, fires fueled by dung, celebrations in which the people feasted on meat singed over the fire or on raw viscera, stealthy marches at dawn, the raid on the corrals, the alarm sounded, the plunder, the battle, the thundering roundup of the stock by naked horsemen, polygamy, stench, and magic.”
Jorge Luis Borges, Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden
“The total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man.”
Giorgio Agamben, The Open
In Tierra adentro (Hinterland), María Korol takes stock of the transformative powers coursing through the windswept plains of the interior. Working across oil paintings, ink drawings, and hand-worked ceramics, Korol renders visible geographic spaces far from ports of entry, in the middle or in between, mysterious zones that mirror the obscure interiority of living creatures.
Much like the Pampas of Korol’s native Argentina, the inland regions of the American South are a space in which an imported European culture on the coasts gave way to something stranger, darker, and wilder: a landscape populated by pirates, soldiers, inscrutable natives, castaways and maroons, cowboys and horses. These are places where the construction of its inhabitants’ selves arose through processes as akin to the weathering of stone and the formation of rivers as the construction of buildings – processes that overlaid the violence, joy, and chaos of the landscape upon the creatures that came to call it home, calling into question demarcations between human and non-human, western and indigenous, educated and savage. The tenuous world Korol depicts in these works should feel recognizable here in Kentucky, a state whose structuring element is an uneasy alliance struck by the expanding power centers of American culture and its fertile, mysterious interior.
Inspired equally by the labyrinthine stories of Jorge Luis Borges, which probe sudden reversals lurking at the edges of our subjectivities, and the tales of pre-hispanic American cultures, where animal spirits intermingle with the dreams and fortunes of the humans living amongst them, these works remind us to never forget that one could easily come to incarnate that which is supposedly opposite. Small oil portraits explode the faces of their subjects, blowing up experiences of defiance, courage, confusion, and guilt to mythic proportions even as the thick brushstrokes blend their edges into the surrounding plains. Other works depict small figures wandering in expansive lands, or charged, unresolved interactions between humans, animals, and other bodies somewhere in between. Korol renders these scenes with joyful, evocative brushwork that combines the elegance and emotional sensitivity of late-period impressionists like Mary Cassat and Henri Matisse with the freedom or deceptive simplicity of artists such as Nellie Mae Rowe and Bill Traylor from the same Southern interior where Korol currently resides.
Alongside these depictions are a number of ceramic figurines, further populating the world of Tierra adentro. These totemic figures provide something of a counterpoint to the jittery, fluid forms in the paintings and drawings, paying homage to beings that have shaped Korol’s practice and life by pointing a way forward through the encounters and metamorphoses she illustrates. Crafted from the very earth itself, the current solidity of these figurines’ soft self-confidence has emerged from their fundamental pliability and openness to being shaped by the world. From the dark underbrush and dense interior of the Americas, Korol’s work attempts to uncover a form of life which welcomes transformation without being destroyed by it, which celebrates difference without petrifying it, and which confronts the fundamental unknowability of the interior with love, rather than fear.