“I’ve always been invested in thinking about land as site, as territory, as form, as matter, and as an ideal,” says Lena Cobangbang. “If my previous show [at the Pinto Museum] invoked land as Edenic paradise lost in its nostalgic romanticism, in Terratorial Piecings, land [is] dissected and spliced from its basic syntax to its connotative meaning, like disassembled puzzle pieces seeking to be reconfigured.”

“Terratorial,” here, is no misprint, and by wordplay, Cobangbang is able to reclaim the root of terre and deterritorialize the notion of territory itself so that it would be as if territory as an action had never taken place. Thus can we approach land as land, while she calibrates our attention to it by shaking off loaded histories of provenances and ownerships while playing with the allusive capacities that cartographical forms retain. In this suite of abstract works, land is both form and idea, or better yet, land itself is abstract art, insofar as the latter is always both.

Several of the watercolor paintings here abstract the world map, rendering it in the visual vocabulary of camouflage. The largest shows in a single map three major geologic transformations, with each transformation signified by a different pattern. Time in this instance therefore collapses—we see past, present, and future—and all of it is space. Without a legend, only the backstory of its process and referent, this map requires that it be read differently, as both a repository of information and an accumulation of patterns whose meanings open wide.

Indeed, confronted as itself, land rejects its geopolitical designations, deems them arbitrary. Not that Cobangbang is capable of a naïve interest in a rose-colored world without country; it is that the desire for a new piecing together seems the animating drive of this show. A series of smaller watercolors, after all, renders the world map as a loose collection of roadkill, with some forms appearing like splattered frogs or run-over dogs. And further, on one wall, abstracted flag patterns that were painted on small jigsaw puzzle pieces are hung on the wall to appear scattered, occasioning the pointed and subtle question “What whole can these parts make?”

If the parts can make only another puzzle, then the thought turns in on itself to ask if it is a puzzle at all.

In another abstract painting, what appears to be a high Modernist abstract painting is apparently based on a photograph of a corner in the city that has been pissed upon, evoking the animal’s tendency to mark territory. Such tendency to territorialize is further explored in works that invoke the work of H.R. Ocampo and Maria Taniguchi, fused together in a watercolor that fairly grabs forms that the artists have made, so to speak, their trade and territory—Ocampo’s camouflage-like shapes and Taniguchi’s bricks. “Divergent,” she comments tellingly, referring to “what people think about, [given] the same thing.”

Can land in fact be territorialized? Cobangbang seems to suggest that it can be only insofar as it can’t ever be that territory exists only as possibility, as temporary epithet. And so, too, with abstract forms. As Henri Focillon writes in The Life of Forms in Art (1934):

In Lena Cobangbang’s Terratorial Piecings, the “indefinite realm” of which Focillon speaks may very well be the world itself.

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