The Sea Inside

What…this? It’s called a rusa. And it’s how Mexicans dunk on the world when it comes to electrolyte hydration. Sea salt, lime juice, and mineral water. Leave one on the nightstand when you go to bed. Pound it when you rise. Before your coffee. Clears your gulliver, oils your joints. It’s elemental, easily notated on the periodic table. A simple alchemy. Science and nature. I’m going somewhere with this.

A rusa is also quenching and salubrious on the rocks in the afternoon. Maybe with a view of smoke-belching Popocatépetl out the 1D window as you descend into the City of Chilangos. That’s how I found myself reviewing my notes, trying to boil down my recent experience with sculptor Estrid Lutz.

I’d been made aware of her via Leila Takeda, a friend in Puerto Escondido, who had written that she thought I’d appreciate Lutz’s work. Furthermore, she saw some affinity in our approaches. What that meant, I hadn’t the foggiest. But I was (1) made curious and am (2) unlikely to need much reason to lurch around Oaxaca and have (3) learned to never discount overtly mystical moments of womanly intuition. And Lutz indeed makes for a fascinating study. 

And what of my notes? In the best of times, they are damn near gestural. In the good light of the airplane cabin, I transferred that Laotian alphabet to something useful. The cocktail-napkin hash is transcribed into a small pressboard cahier, eventually winnowed down into simple prompts. Only myself and maybe a Navajo code talker could ever make sense of them. Just try:

Sun Ra

William Gibson

Rachel Carson

Marseille

She is hard-core

LCD Soundsystem

Protective eyewear

Hotel Santa Fe rellenos

Sleater-Kinney (Janet Weiss)

SpaceX

La Punta Kooks

Audubon

Coco Nogales

Jumpsuits

Custardy French scrambled eggs

Mark Richards Twin (en verdad)

Ketones

Sensible Birkies

A town called Post-Covid

Chlorophyll

Freud

Sine waves

Normandy butter

Subsurface noises (parrotfish chewing coral)

Tea and sympathy

Space-station mesh

Wave-tangled hair

Diamanda Galás

Hyper-organized

Bioluminescence

They are always this opaque, but when you swish the pan, flakes of color show. Enough thin gold to make a wire. Soon enough, you can erect an armature. Sufficient to make a mobile. Or tell a story. 

•

I met with Lutz in Puerto Escondido on the rooftop terraza of the Hotel Santa Fe, which enjoys what realtors call a “privileged view” of the Mexican Pipeline. (As with that dreary marketing adjective “elevated,” protect your wallet when you hear it.) The restaurant is famed for its finely crafted vegetarian preparations. I was scanning the menu in vain, trying to meet my protein grams-per-kilo target, when Lutz sidled up. She wore a sleeveless tropical-print maxi dress, her hair a loose nimbus of sun-streaked health. I don’t recall a handbag. As one does, we started at the beginning.  

Lutz was born and raised in the French country village of La Creuse, “in the absolute middle of nowhere,” as she told me several times. She almost shudders when she says it. One feels the weight of bad memories. Country drudgery and small-mindedness. One gets a glimpse of her strength in such moments. Her ability to slip the cleats, to sail off. 

“You have to imagine a desertic zone,” she says. 

(She speaks in infinitives: “I am to come from a farm.” Her English is otherwise careful and precise, though her mind runs leagues beyond her tongue. Her Spanish is fluid. Her native French—to which she lapses in time of need—is honey slowly running between pats of butter. Even when she is speaking to matters of fact. Say, citing technical specs of her materials, most often involving nosebleed-expensive aerospace products.)

From that small village, she occasionally holidayed on the coast. 

“Since I was a kid, I had a special relationship with the ocean,” she says. “The tides there in the Atlantic can go out 2 kilometers. It was like it was alive. It was super inspiring for me. Then, since I was a teenager, even in the countryside, I collected magazine photographs of waves. Huge waves. Not surfing. Just huge waves. Then, when I was 20, I saw my first tubing wave, at Mundaka in Spain.”

Unable to describe the source of that appeal, Lutz intimates that waves have always been a personal motif. Not so much realized in her work, but there nonetheless. An obvious gift for the visual arts led to her graduation from l’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and ArtCenter in Los Angeles. She showed broadly, established gallery representation, and was ensconced in a traditional sort of upper-echelon artistic flight path. That’s precisely when fate pitched a freeroll. 2018. An invite to serve as an artist-in-residence on the coast of Mainland Mexico. Lutz accepted. 

We will avoid the name of that institution because, as Lutz says, “they contacted me and proposed to make a project. It was kind of a fake project. When I told them I wanted to do something with the [local] surf community, they said, ‘Hey, what are you thinking? You aren’t coming for a holiday!’ They thought I just wanted to surf, to work with surfers…hot guys.” 

She laughs into her hand. It struck her as a dumb, shortsighted concern. Her body of work and her industry speaks for itself. They agreed to part ways. She found herself adrift on that jungle coast. Having known of the waves of Zicatela, she installed herself in a hammock at La Punta, Puerto Escondido. She had little choice. Back in France, her gallerist wasn’t paying her. “He was selling the work on my back,” she says. 

“I was living a hammock life, drinking coconuts, going to fish with a harpoon to eat—I was okay,” she says. “I was very experienced with resin from my artworks, so I found a local surfboard guy to see if I could help him. I was using the trash of the shapers. I used the foam and glass fibers. I made collage and put impressions on them. Giant pieces. And I wanted to crash test them. I put them in the ocean at Zicatela, and for sure they broke. Broken Photochromic Bones—a series I did. People from the art world back home said, ‘What are you doing? You will lose your career!’ But I didn’t want to return to Europe.” She slept in that hammock for more than a year.

The pandemic froze her in place, but Puerto employed a common-sense attitude. The open air, the beach, the sea—all were unchained. Foreign visitors could not leave their countries. This, of course, crippled the local economy. 

“I place an ad looking for an assistant,” she recalls. “But they had to be a big-wave surfer. And that’s how I began surfing. I choose a guy—his name is Angelo Donnanno—and he was also a surf teacher. With COVID, he had no students and I had no exhibitions. So, I followed him and some professional surfers to La Escondida. I learned not just surfing, but waves as it related to my work. I can’t put my stuff in the ocean when it’s big. It was funny, because I was never sportif—the locals thought that I was a geek. A wannabe surfer. I dive every day. I love to see the creatures. But finally a local said, ‘It’s time for you to surf.’ Now I kind of hate him, because I am an addict.”

Indeed, she especially treasures a nearby wave known for its seclusion, a place where she can get reps in peace. She’d sent me photos, and I monitored her progress from afar. It was sort of astonishing—like watching a time lapse of evolution. There she is trimming efficiently. Now she’s bending at the knees, a style taking shape. There she is on a well-overhead wave, legs flexed, loading up for a turn. It looked like some polar opposite of the academy but mirrored her focus in that world.  

Her academic success and critical attention had led to a whirl of openings, parties, and “kissing ass.” She, of course, just wanted to make art. To pursue what was in her. Not in some facile “artist’s statement” way. She needed to roll up her sleeves. To chase her vision off the reef and into open water. And should it clear the surface, Lutz was inclined to follow. Right into space, as it turns out.

•

Studying reviews of her past shows, I found references to cyberpunk and the (lowercase) metaverse. Most of these articles seemed self-consciously academic and overly pat, but this passage from Piero Bisello seemed to decode something:

“They both dislike obsessive precision, finishedness, common beauty and preciousness. Moreover, if the 80s and 90s cyberpunks and metaversians were actually rather sleek in their aesthetics—polished steel prosthetics and beautifully crafted machines were a must—Lutz instead enjoys the debris and cracked leftovers of hyper technological materials like those used for spacecrafts or Internet infrastructure. 

“Her stuff is broken and volatile, like that in the works of earlier artists who adopted and renovated punk attitudes in the late 90s and early 2000s. Think of Steven Parrino and Banks Violette for example, more extreme artists than Lutz to some extent, visually interpreting attitudes differently, yet comparable in their love for adrenaline and intensity. It is no surprise that, like Parrino and Violette, Lutz is also a musician—an early punk drummer to be precise.”

If you’re a hammer, everything presents as a nail. To a surfer’s eye, it starts with surfboards. In a piece from her show Pipelines Mashups, calcified threads of cured-resin fiberglass hang like jellyfish tentacles from the main composition, colored with photoluminescent pigment. The “painting” conjures life forms as found in the Mariana Trench. Or some unexplored planet. Like many of her works, they are designed to hang from guylines from the ceiling. But that’s never enough for Lutz. A woman of action, she demands kinetic case studies. Say, swimming a work into the shorepound. Pushing a piece over the falls, kablaam! into oblivion. Taking an artwork up in an ultralight airplane, only to see it torn asunder by the prop wash. 

I know better than to ask the reason. It’s there for the taking. Material stress. Aesthetic destruction. Life cycles. As found in biology as well as in technology. Every fish on the planet preordained to be eaten by something. Satellites, highborn on some engineer’s drafting table, gusting along on the solar breeze, falling to earth as useless space junk. Planned obsolescence? It’s all planned. By someone, something, some design. From a microchip to a mangrove snapper.

Calcified threads of cured-resin fiberglass hang like jellyfish tentacles from the main composition, colored with photoluminescent pigment. 

Lutz invites me to her studio. It’s also her domicile and laboratory. It’s not in the commercial hostel warren of La Punta, nor in the fresón designer district south of town. For five years she’s lived alone in a bungalow in the working-class heart of town. She’s improved on it over the years, painting, landscaping, and decorating. Wherever a Frenchwoman goes, a piece of belle France comes with her. She chose the house because of the outsize backyard. Her work demands covered storage, tool benches, wooden-crate-packing stations, places to sculpt, to paint, to glass, to hang.  

The studio is remarkably organized, almost hermetic despite being outdoors. She covered her chain-link fence with greenhouse tarps when she discovered some speedheads spying on her. She catches my look and says that she’s not overly concerned. Most working artists are inured to laboring in transitional zones. Down at the beach, she’s looked after by the locals, from alpha citizens like Marcial Monreal down to the ding-repair kids. They all call her “Estrella.”

Inside her home, the front room serves as an office. A large table holds her laptop, a French press, a serious-looking half-face respirator, a commercial epoxy dryer, books, and what appears to be a piece of motorhome radiator screen. This last is nothing so prosaic. Researching in her precision manner, she discovered honeycomb aerospace-aluminum flex core. It’s a featherweight component used in spacecraft. The manufacturer offers a miles-long data sheet for its approved uses. Walking us back outside, she puts on a pair of heavy gloves, grabbing a sheet of this mesh. 

“I can make a 3-meter work from this,” she says. 

She stretches a tea-towel-size piece. It expands like the bellows of an accordion, twisting in her grip. It’s dangerously sharp, like a million little X-Acto blades. Standing behind it, she disappears with a slight degree change. Returning it to right angles, she reappears, fuschia dress popping out of the green background, laughing at the magic. She will cut such a piece with tin shears, glass it with epoxy prepreg, let the sun color-cure it, and then she will just…gestate. She’ll live with it for a time, deciding whether or not it meets her requirements. 

Back inside, she begs my pardon to answer a quick email from a curator. Her latest show, Chaos Sensible, opens in a month in an old fortress gallery in Villefranche-sur-Mer. She will shuttle the works herself in a pile of board bags to Mexico City and to Paris and to Marseille. There she will weather the Gucci art hags and the callow fuckboys, the champagne meet-and-greets and jealous mock approval, the capital-A art capital-W world that she depends on and tries to endure. She messages me from France, bemoaning her fate. Back to your ocean, I order. 

A Spaniard goes to Paris and becomes Picasso. A Londoner goes to Hollywood and becomes Chaplin. A woman from a “desertic place” goes to Oaxaca and becomes Estrid Lutz.

[Feature image: HORNY OCEAN FURY, 2024, blown sanded glass, 22 × 16 × 13 inches. Photo by ©️Cirva/Bérangère Huguet.]