Joel Shapiro: Four Bronzes: Meridiano, Puerto Escondido, Mexico

Conceived by Tatsuro Miki and Axel Vervoordt, the architectural design of Meridiano draws from the tenets of sacred geometry, oriented in line with Teotihuacán to the four cardinal directions: the Pacific Ocean to the south, the mountain range to the north, and the border between land and sea striking straight from due east to due west. The dynamism of Shapiro’s sculptures is mirrored in the viewing experience, where the passage of time visible through the isolated fragment of sky within the gallery and its surrounding landscape presents a shifting setting. Depending on the hour of the day, the geometry of shadows cast by the artist’s bronzes traces different forms.

The implied movement imbued in Shapiro’s figurative allusions is also significant in the context of the cultural history of the land it occupies. In the graphic conventions of Mesoamerican codices, manuscripts once used to describe the cosmos by indigenous civilizations, expressed mythic narratives in spatial, even choreographic form. The shape of the maps was determined by the limits of the page, each a panel of space, whose borders were decorated by signs that indicated direction. The basis of this cartography was often informed by celestial observation—of how the moon, stars, and planets moved across the sky. Likewise, how viewers navigate Shapiro’s work is determined by the relationship one object holds with the next, an internal consistency shared with readings of the cosmological codex. In Joel Shapiro: Four Bronzes, how space and scale perform is as much about the suggestion of the body inherent within the sculptures as it is about how our bodies move around them. 

Shapiro’s sculptures map figures as planar beings, where points transform into lines, and lines into volumes, often appearing like bodies captured in motion. “While minimalism is against reference, I’ve always insisted on being referential,”  says Shapiro. The accuracy of scale, measurement, and orientation in cosmological architecture was supplanted by personal perception: their sightlines were not universal, but rather local and contingent on the specific latitude of the site’s geography. Shapiro’s work assumes a similar relationship to place within Meridiano.