Pandora’s Box:

The art of Cora de Lang

by Anoli PERERA

Cora de Lang’s Pandora’s Box was held at Ret Dot Gallery recently.

Cora de Lang has a way of weaving stories within her art incorporating memories, experiences, and pangs of nostalgia creating a visual text that oscillate between reality and the dream world.

The labyrinth of scenes made with clusters of images within one painting, sometimes intertwined without full stops or clear progression from one to the other, challenges the viewer to venture deep into the pictorial language of each art work, and crack the code that would unveil the whole story. On the first glance, de Lang’s work can be seen as beautiful tapestries of images that offer an exoticized iconic representation of artifacts and ritual art from Africa, South America and Australasia, referring to continents but not really pinpointing to an exact geographic location or referring to one particular historical/cultural genealogy.

They remind me of stories by Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and their version of storytelling in the genre of magic realism where the mundane is mingled with the fantastic, where readers constantly cross from one altered state of consciousness to another, and imagination is portrayed as real, vividly and phenomenally. If de Lang narrates simple stories in her work, then she does so with a kind of playful complexity where boundaries of myths, fantasies, dreams and reality are never intended to be clear.

Pandora’s Box cannot distance itself from the ideas of women as keepers of memory. The works use a series of boxes made by de Lang’s father’s packaging factory in Argentina.

These boxes turned into little storage chests where nostalgic memories, personal tit bits and secret desires rest.

Each box invokes a particular memory and desire of the artist, a desire to remember and record through the transformation of a simple box into a unique time capsule.

This series of works creatively and sensitively presents the dilemma of the nomad who is caught between the desire for rootedness and the demands of transiency.

One wonders if the artist’s purpose in Pandora’s Box is to tell us that the only thing permanent in such a predicament are the memories and the nostalgia that one harbors. Is the Pandora’s Box a wrapping for memorializing of such memories?

The following words by de Lang places these queries as well as much of her artistic quest in context:

“...I myself grew up in the world of boxes and cardboards.

My grandfather had set up a factory of pliable packages; My father took over. And some wrapping material, cardboards and boxes became part of my life - my first “canvases”, my playground for drawings and paintings. A reminder for me are the three “B”s: Boxes, Buenos Aires & Bags

They have accompanied my life, have been my confidants, my solace, my enticement, my playmates, my inspiration and my creative projection...”