ALLEGORIA

Marion Borgelt's story is one of generosity, abundance and profusion. As capricious as nature itself, Borgelt's oeuvre encompasses a myriad of diverse ideas and influences, which present us with a cascade of associations - if not all the answers. The title Allegoria lends a new emphasis to the word allegory, coming, as it does, directly from the Greek: allos other and agoria speaking. Borgelt is indeed speaking otherwise with this profusion of extended metaphors and divergent analogies.

We see the way, for example, Mortar and Vessel: Morphology alludes to a culinary source, leaving us contemplating some grotesque comestible tradition. Envision the provedore of such brews macerated in these primordial pods. Their exquisite, fecund nature brings allusions also of genitalia, strange eggs or parcelled alien embryos or foetuses. A hybrid vessel for the gestation of alien victuals? Indeed, Borgelt does speak of parallel universes, however she is referring to her own meditation on nature and the environment - when small objects are noted, organic shapes memorised, and materials and textures inspire. Small details are exalted for our scrutiny; the stuff of our natural world is transmuted by Borgelt's discernment.

Borgelt is never mean. She works through ideas until she can no longer find ways to expose them. Her suites are plentiful in variations on the theme. There are works in waiting, whose time will come. Borgelt's only frustration is that she can't do it all; there is a balancing act to perform and choices to be made. Borgelt handles this profusion of ideas with deft restraint. From otherness to transcendence, Borgelt achieves a Cartesian impossibility with her synthesis of the corporeal and the ideal sublime. Her emblematic abstractions seem, at first, to be at odds with the organic vessels. However, Borgelt's canvases soon mutate into a visceral presence. Like a heart pumping or blood flowing, there is a constant rhythmic pulsation devised by optical trickery. While Borgelt refers to the matière, or the subjective textural surfaces and the symbolic chapters of these canvases, these works, in the end, reference the body in all its alterity.

A dark vision is played out in Borgelt's paper stacks. Casting her story with anomalous cool symmetry and perfection, Borgelt implicates dark undertones and eventualities within these works. Passages of black and red coerce this flimsy, frail material to communicate violent and sinister accounts. Like a Bunuelian surrealist razor slicing the vulnerable eye, Borgelt perpetrates a succession of cuts and lacerations to this fragile material. Composed incisions and soft folds are then rendered rigid and immutable - their blackness forever punctuated with blood red, all stacked and conserved. A beautiful, cruel scenario hermetically sealed in museological casks.

As if to convince us that she is not a baneful architect, Borgelt displays an irreverent sense of humour in Orchestre des Promeneurs. In an Oppenheimian gesture, Borgelt elevates the humble shoe to high art in the same way the fashion industry elevates itself beyond the parameters of the wearable. For prestigious European fashion houses, extremism is de rigueur.

The extravagant theatre of the catwalk parade is derided here.

The subversive beauty of this jaunty sequence of slippers and shoes flips the story from art to fashion and back again, whilst playfully remarking, tongue in cheek, about both. Footwear is defunctionalised as leather transmutes to wax. Here Borgelt engages mythical symbols as an incantation for ambulation or is it a mere decoration in keeping with Borgelt's ironic inclination? Where Meret Oppenheim played on the feminine mystique, Borgelt paraphrases a camp masculinity. A quirky monogram on the designer label, affixed to the fleshy interior of the shoes symbolises the final twist as it names the contriver of this burlesque installation.

Borgelt's oeil savage casts a wide glance. She reveals infinite possibilities and an abundance of ideas. The notebooks and diaries are brimming with unrequited drafts. But for all this Borgelt is an obsessive perfectionist; each work painstakingly tended, not a mark out of place. A casual brushstroke comes from rigorous practice. Her penchant for meticulousness means nothing is overlooked. It is utterly consistent with Borgelt's generosity that here, like the produce from the mythical horn of plenty, are the exquisite fruits of an aberrant cornucopia.

Cherry Hood