A four-foot, seven-hundred-pound Chicago Cubs bear in mirror-bright cast chrome. The artist owned the room. Curative built the object.
COHERE is the clearest statement of one half of how Curative works. Louis De Guzman owned the Chicago Cubs relationship. He came to Curative not for the introduction but for the ability to turn a design into a 700-pound object that could stand in a Major League ballpark and survive the scrutiny. Curative developed the piece with him and, once the design was approved, became the fabricator: production and logistics, start to installed object. The artist keeps the room. Curative builds the work.
That honesty is also the selling proposition. An artist with a blue-chip relationship does not have to hand over the client to get museum-grade fabrication. Curative can sit behind the artist rather than in front of them, which is exactly why the credit reads produced for Louis De Guzman and the Chicago Cubs, in that order.
The sculpture reads, at distance, as the Cubs bear. Up close it dissolves into Louis De Guzman’s vocabulary: dozens of folded, petal-like forms packed into a dense mass, the face pushed forward in polished silver while the mane and ground turn team red and deep blue. The finish is cast, color-electroplated chrome, so the whole surface behaves like a mirror and pulls the room, the lights, and the viewer into the piece.
It is compact and astonishingly heavy: four feet tall, close to 700 pounds. That ratio is the quiet feat of the thing. It has the presence of something much larger because the material is doing the work, mirror-bright and unbroken, and because every one of those folded forms had to cohere into a single legible animal. Naming it COHERE is the thesis in a word. Many separate parts resolving, from the right distance, into one whole.
Development with the artist first: taking Louis De Guzman’s design and engineering it into something that could actually be cast, plated, and stood up at that weight. On approval, Curative handled production and logistics in full, as the fabricator, and delivered the finished piece to Wrigley Field, where it was unveiled with an event at installation. What Curative did not do, and does not claim, is the Cubs relationship. That was the artist’s.
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