“The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals”

—Tulips, Sylvia Plath, 1961

The isolation index is:

A. Measured by the number of responses that include inanimate objects in Rorschach’s inkblot diagnostic, particularly evocations of botany, landscape, or nature. [1]

B. A rubric to account for a subject’s depression and depersonalization.

C. The spectrum of human experience felt in response to the global coronavirus pandemic and exacerbated by the institutional failures that caused staggering death rates worldwide.

D. The answer is on the tip of my tongue.

E. All of the above.

In the spring of 2020, as the world was in lockdown and the tragedy of Covid was unspooling, Patricia Iglesias Peco planted seeds of life. Her paintings, drawings, and ceramics have always been populated by organic blobs, protrusions of pistil and stamen, shapes recalling kitchen utensils and cake molds. But in those months of isolation the psycho-sexual exuberance pushing against boundaries of abstraction evolved and grew legs, fur, beaks. Just as the global populace succumbed to collective fantasies of animals slowly encroaching into now vacant cities—the debunked dolphins in the Venetian canals, sea lions bathing sumptuously in the port of Iglesias Peco’s native Buenos Aires—she created a fantastic zoological menagerie of her own. Creatures ranging from the exotic to the domestic crawled, flew, and ambled into her work as series she called “Animals in Quarantine.” As she said, “While I had a feeling of being in a cage, I started to imagine all these stories that could be happening while we were not bothering them, the funny and strange interactions that these animals would be having.” In paintings on mylar and linen, Iglesias Peco’s lines glide into fanciful shapes, molting into parti-colored iguanas or coaxing two blue mice from the garden hiding place.

Drawn to the flora of the landscape as much as to the animals, Iglesias Peco embarked on a concurrent series that resuscitates the Dutch still lives that have fascinated her for years. The sexual undercurrents (that albeit would often bubble over into penile projections) of her earlier more abstract work took on more deliberate manifestations of botanical excess. In his essay “The Language of the Flowers,” Georges Bataille comments that “even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their centers by hairy sexual organs.”[2] Correcting the noble and romantic ideals projected onto flowers, he says “after a very short period of glory the marvelous corolla rots indecently in the sun, thus becoming, for the plant, a garish withering.”[3] While this line of thinking neatly tongues into the history of the still life or nature morte painting that Iglesias Peco was investigating, her flowers are “aggressive, provocative, and in a state of arousal.” Her wild blooms unmoor tradition, exploding from vases in bursts of chaotic sexuality. Like frenzied maenads, they not only abandon themselves to the gusts of the painted atmosphere but seem to control the very weather itself. Stilled in heightened sexual throes, Iglesias Peco suspends her bouquets in the moment prior to death drive’s apprehension—Persephones before Hell—forestalling the vanitas decay, the death of nature. She calls these feral florals Naturaleza Viva, the seeds she planted in isolation coming to life.

[1] Webster, Jamieson. “Bad Flowers.” Spike Magazine, Autumn 2020: 34-41.

[2] Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 12

[3] ibid