Ana Tiscornia’s delicate, geometric paintings hold a curious complexity; they display two (or even three) different dimensions at once.
A Multi-Dimensional Approach
Most evident in the shape of the flat plastered works is the two-dimensional language of architectural drafting. Tiscornia, who trained as an architect in her native Uruguay, often scraps the four-walled canvas for the angles of a building’s floor plan. Careful lines direct the art, some joining to enclose spaces, others trailing onto the wall as ideas yet to unfold.
Each of Tiscornia’s works thus speak to a climate of both construction and destruction.
The paintings are simultaneously three-dimensional in their coarse materials, which incorporate real fragments of building decay scavenged by the artist. Crackling paint and cut-out fabrics produce a textured depth—and perhaps even a fourth dimension, when imagining the matter’s embodied memory reaching back in time.
Each of Tiscornia’s works thus speak to a climate of both construction and destruction, two words that pierce her new solo show “Neighbors,” on view at Bienvenu Steinberg & C through May 10.
Acrylic on canvas (triptych),
64 × 57.5 × 1.5 in (162.6 × 146 × 3.8 cm).
Right: Ana Tiscornia, Next to the Empty Room, 2023.
Plaster, acrylic, and linen on panel,
16 1/2 × 24 × 3/4 in (41.9 × 61 × 1.9 cm).
Image courtesy of Bienvenu Steinberg & C.
Two cacti and wall installation, 2025.
Acrylic on wall, cacti.
Right: Ana Tiscornia, Other Blue House, 2024.
Plaster, acrylic and fabric on panel,
16.5 × 30.25 in (41.9 × 76.8 cm).
Image courtesy of Bienvenu Steinberg & C.
Bringing Resilience to Life
There is a definite sadness in Tiscornia’s details, fragments recalling scratched walls or torn rugs that now sketch spaces on canvas but once perhaps belonged to an actual room. They conjure loss and displacement—though the artist’s architectural hand extracts the chaos from destruction (Tiscornia’s debris falls into rational compositions even in her more intricate collages and sculptures.)
Tiscornia counteracts her art’s angular solemnity with a note of resilience embodied in loosely drawn cacti that infiltrate her work like a welcome weed. Small and curvy, they snake between the cracks of her paintings, plunging through the rubble and into the white cube; spot them and understand that nature bears hardiness and hope.
Tiscornia counteracts her art’s angular solemnity with a note of resilience embodied in loosely drawn cacti that infiltrate her work like a welcome weed.
In “Neighbors,” Tiscornia pays tribute to her trusty shrub with four large paintings that center cacti and reduce the built environment to a gesture in the background. In fact, sparing some chalky lines that meet at staunch right angles to suggest buildings, Tiscornia’s usual precision is in these works nearly undone. Yet these are still not natural landscapes; rather, cacti conquer architecture. Here, Tiscornia scratches and smears plaster onto entire canvases of weathered paint, erecting walls to which the plants attach. The experience is less one of looking at Tiscornia’s structures from above, than of standing between them—a point homed in by real, potted cacti that cluster along the gallery against skylines painted on the wall. Still, an inevitable air of destruction looms near, like in the splintering holes hammered into the plywood canvases of “Other Landscape II” (2024) and “Behind the Steps” (2024).
Image courtesy of Bienvenu Steinberg & C.
The unequivocal emphasis on the cactus in “Neighbors” may be the artist’s plea for perseverance in the face of our dangerously destructive time. As for her smaller, architectural works, it is up to the viewer to decide whether there lay seeds for reconstruction between Tiscornia’s incomplete lines, or just the skeletons of structures, maps of what once was.
“Neighbors” is on view at Bienvenu Steinberg & C in New York City through May 10.
Featured image: Ana Tiscornia, Behind the Steps, 2024. Acrylic on canvas and wood panel. 80 × 82 × 1.5 in (203 × 208.3 × 4 cm). Image courtesy of Bienvenu Steinberg & C.
