Wexler Gallery Plays Host to Marcus De Paula’s Illuminated Megaliths

Autodidact sculptor Marcus Vinícius De Paula was exposed to the notions of duality and transcendence from an early age. While his father directed NASA missions, his mother was a painter and ceramicist. From the former, he gained a fundamental understanding of the cosmos and a person’s infinitesimal place within its unfathomable ambit. From the latter, he gleaned an implicit appreciation for natural materials and age-old, hands-on craft. The Brooklyn-based talent’s monolithic, pyramidal, and totemic sculptures stem from an implicit coherence of both practical and expressive, immaterial and material approaches. De Paula wields a set of practical skills, all while deploying a sense of unencumbered yet distilled artistic expression.

Carefully introduced voids cleverly disrupt the totality of what would otherwise be impenetrable monoliths. Emitting from within, projected light imbues the pieces with a sense of ethereality, playing up the delicate dichotomy of fleeting temporality and primordial permanence. The towering forms are at once present in the moment and grounded in the immeasurability of geological time.

Displayed as part of his “Interstice: Thresholds Carved with Light and Time” solo show on view at Philadelphia’s Wexler Gallery through August 14, these otherworldly megaliths result from an almost therapeutic exercise: a desire to mitigate the seemingly insurmountable challenges of our current moment by physically working material that’s been around since Hadeanic times—that has borne witness to it all.

“My sculptural practice started in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, a chapter in our global lives marked by a monumental feeling of uncertainty, civilizational fragility, and precariousness of life,” he explains. “I wanted to create artifacts that are reminders of our place in the grander scheme of things, from a time and space perspective, of how special our mere existence is and how, in the timescale of the universe, we are here for just a brief moment.”

The sculptures—produced out of obscure marble, rare granite, hard-to-source alabaster, and meticulously colored resin—hold both perspectives simultaneously in order to ease the personal and shared cultural pressures we place on our decisions, legacies, and efforts. Standing a whopping 10 feet tall and weighing a hefty 3,000 pounds, Titan serves as a kind of portal: a loosely confined liminal threshold where one can engage in metaphysical reflection. The concave HLX-1 and Mini mirror-esque wall pieces carry just enough of a reflective quality to facilitate a similar experience.

“I am interested in helping our culture simultaneously hold conflicting dualities,” the artist adds. “The cosmic view can make our problems appear insignificant, but it can also offer relief. The sculptures are tools to contextualize and process the present moment, mechanisms for perspective as a form of comfort.”

Harnessing the visual language of celestial bodies, geological formations, and monumental architecture, it is meant to elicit within the viewer a sense of vastness, but also endurance and even reassurance. Light comes in as an evolutionary, instinctual trigger: the amplification of a space dedicated to communal gathering, able to offer heat, safety, and sustenance. “Light is not only an element in and of itself but a force affecting its surroundings—casting shadows on the elevations and depressions of the stone, reflecting and being absorbed by the glossy and matte finishes, bringing awareness to the fissures and inclusions within the depths of what are actually translucent stones,” De Paula concludes.