Álvaro Urbano’s Prelude: Chimeric Bloom
- Johannes Scott
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
In the art installation PRELUDE at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, the artist Álvaro Urbano conjures a spectral mise en scène of a 19th century landscaped area situated in the heart of Central Park. Located near Ramble Stone Arch, a bridge built with rough-hewn stones to look like it naturally formed, the area was designed to evoke the “Forever Wild” natural forests of upstate New York.
Through a meticulous choreography of sculptural elements— dogwood blossoms, fallen apples, raindrops, a lamp, and a nest tucked away into a discarded box— Urbano stages not a reconstruction but a simulation. The installation does not seek to restore the original but to gesture toward its trace of absence, presenting viewers with a simulacrum of nature that resists decay yet mourns its own vitality.
Urbano’s prominent sculptural element is casted directly from a botanical specimen, capturing the intricate textures and organic irregularities of the original Dogwood tree. This technique— casting from life— places Urbano’s practice in dialogue with traditions of natural history display and forensic preservation, while also subverting them. By rendering ephemeral organic matter in durable metal, he creates a fabricated trace of the Real.
In Lacanian terms, the casting process literalizes the ‘objet a’ dynamic: the cast branch is not the object of desire, but its remainder— a sculptural trace of something lost, now reconstituted as uncanny apparition that both reveals and withholds. The cast blossom stages a kind of artificial permanence, and its painted surface a screen for the reflective self— a ruin where the viewer becomes complicit in the metonymic search for the inaccessible.
The curatorial announcement to the exhibition reads:
“The landscape, benches and passersby from the park have vanished; just an isolated branch remains– an intruder, growing from the wall, as if the framing of the situation has engulfed it accidentally into a filmic frame. Raindrops cling to the windows of the room, a sign of a passing storm. The blooming dogwood and window droplets signal a pause, a cessation from the regular flow of time, a still and permanent spring.”
Whereas the 19th century design of winding, labyrinthian paths for rustic ambling was celebrated in the parlance of its time for “obscurity, not absolutely impenetrable, but sufficient to affect the imagination with a sense of mystery,” Urbano’s installation refutes pastoral idealisation. In this way, PRELUDE is not merely an installation—it is the remnant as phantasmatic lure – a psychoanalytic landscape as placeholder not of what was, but of a forever deferred, unattainable Eden. Urbano’s work does not offer resolution; it sustains the exquisite ache of desire itself.
(The exhibition ends 22 August 2025 at 385 Broadway, New York.)
Johannes Scott, August 2025
