To be all up front: I am a fan of Renata Ottati. Girl! – the way she gives a fat-ass form to the dumb things that linger and replay over and over and over again in her mind is phenomenal – I fucking love it. Based between Guayaquil (Ecuador) and Glasgow (Scotland) – with artworks featuring in recent exhibitions in Miami and Oslo – Ottati often works with ready-mades or rather remade ready-made-like forms; she likes the ‘loud silences’ in the otherwise mundane, ‘the disappearance and resurfacing of value through distance’, to quote some online sources. Appearing familiar yet eerily out of context, occasionally OTT and lavish in energy, Ottati’s work questions the abject face of things – disused display counters, the kind you might see blocking thoroughfares in shopping malls, as with Held (2025), or a massing of jewel-tone party boxes, think community centre kids party style gifts unusually given to each young guest, ¿Preguntas? (2024) [Questions? (2024)] – bringing a sense of human experience back to the stuff we overlook and disregard.
Not to be derogatory – to the pedestrian, Ottati’s current exhibition Chambers (at city gallery, Glasgow, until December 7th 2025) could seem rather What? – here we see nothing more than an oversized Koons-esque transparent inflatable caterpillar filling half the gallery, Blue skies (2025), its feelers touching up the back wall of the space. The discerning viewer, or at least one who looks at the exhibition’s work list, might also spot Lullaby (2025), a stack of resort-style beach towels sequestered almost out of sight high in one of the gallery’s built-in shelves. Embroidered with little princess italics to spell out a poem of sorts – ‘Sleep, sleep my butterfly, close your little eyes my butterfly, my butterfly, my butterfly’ – the materiality of Lullaby complements that of Blue skies, bringing to mind trope-ish images of summer beach holidays; the desire – the secret desire I dare say we all dream for – to throw down the inflatable and to recline in rays of scorching skin kisses. It’s a seductive mind image.
Desire, seduction and obsession are the verby anchors of Ottati’s exhibtion. Riffing on the historical use of the ready-made form, à la Duchamp, the two artworks in Chambers embrace senses of these terms, making them operate through a logic of iykyk – if you know… I know a little something about the genealogy of these artworks, Blue skies in particular. Back in the summer, Ottati, whilst in London or travelling somewhere urbain, posted an Instagram Story spotlighting a carefully sculptured caterpillar-shaped hedge; a fantastic piece of topiary that’s been metamorphosing in her mind, waiting for a moment to burst into new life ever since. I can remember watching this Story, I reckon I responded with a heart, some love-fire perhaps. Metamorphosed to suit the space of city gallery, this once green form now rests as a testament to how obsessions grow in one’s mind; how such attractions shift and change as their presence lingers large, lovingly imposing.
As with the original hedge, the sculpture of Blue skies has been meticulously crafted – cut and glued from PVC panels, with a “lot of maths involved”, so I was told. Further, filled with the artist’s breath, and in need of the occasional topping up via a beach-ball mouth valve, the work instantiates something of the daily labour involved with caring for a beloved – be that a person or, in this case, the body of an infatuation – the relational labour that is love. When thought of as a metaphorical object representing such acts of maintenance, Blue skies gives form to otherwise invisible routines of care and affection; what it takes to tend to another, how such work feels both precarious and rewarding, as well as to how much life space these efforts take up. Indeed, as Ottati’s caterpillar looks hard into the wall of the gallery, the physical placement of the work seems allusive of the way these labours are overlooked, embodying the bittersweetness of any love act.
Reflecting on Chambers, and what I hear responding from Ottati’s sculptural forms, my mind is drawn to Gillian Rose’s notion of love’s work (see Rose’s 1995 book of the same title). That is, of the agonising process involved with any act of love; a sensation which, like desire, seduction and obsession, is innately undemocratic, crafted through personal vulnerability – giving oneself to another – ecstasy and despair. Love, in other words, is a blue sky image, easy to picture but hard to form, growing greater with distance and imperfection; a process where hidden labours create an inherent struggle that must be reckoned with and endured, for these are the crawling sensations that birth butterfly feelings.
Chambers is a quiet exhibition. As with much of Ottati’s work, this aesthetic quality lends itself to contemplation, to attend to the nature of things; how the belittled can linger in the heart, in mind, growing and morphing through the labours of care to become full in body – I fucking love it.
Renata Ottati, Chambers city gallery, Glasgow
Watch: instagram.com/p/DQ9h4i7jGYO/
