Invisible Forces: Cecilia Caldiera’s Diagrammatic Language

Exhibition view of Oh the way a mineral fractures at Astor Weeks. 
Image courtesy of the artists and Astor Weeks, New York, NY

By GLADYS LOU December 29, 2025

Architectural blueprints, scientific diagrams, and musical scores transform seemingly neutral notational systems into enigmatic structures that re-map attention and perception. In Oh the way a mineral fractures at Astor Weeks, artists Cecilia Caldiera, Keli Safia Maksud, and Renee Gladman use diagrammatic language to decipher the geological and urban infrastructures that unconsciously script movement. Their works consider maps and graphs as hidden systems that guide the order in which we understand the world through symbols and allegories.

Among the three, Caldiera’s contributions anchor the exhibition with a focus on invisible forces that guide the body through space, considering geographical structures through fractures and flows. A New York-based artist working across sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, Caldiera roots her practice in research on urban planning and waste. Her work investigates how infrastructural systems choreograph bodies, directing, diverting, pausing, and reorienting them through the built environment. They reveal how sculptural forms subliminally guide spatial perception, prompting viewers to follow unspoken instructions about where to look and how to move.

Cecilia Caldiera, Accumulation Drawing: Between Two Suns, 2025, wax, steel,
cardboard, plastic, 60 x 82 inches. Image courtesy of the artists and Astor Weeks.

At the gallery entrance, her installation Accumulation Drawing: Between Two Suns (2025) brings forth considerations of materiality. Caldiera constructs what she calls an “earthly constellation,” embedding roadside waste collected during her city walks such as metallic wires, plastic wrappers, and glass shards into wax panels. The same shape reappear in a cardboard replica placed right next to it, creating a juxtaposition that questions the hierarchies of value assigned to materials.

Cecilia Caldiera, Dust (fractured), 2025, glass, paper, plastic, 
15 1⁄2 x 40 x 3 1⁄2 inches. Image courtesy of the artists and Astor Weeks.

In a corner of the gallery, Dust (fractured) (2025) leans against the wall, composed of overlapping layers of tinted and frosted glass left with stains and dirt. The irregularly cut edges and misty surface evoke suspended particles or pollutants rising from a street after a car passes. Paper tags marked with numbers bordered the panels, recalling connect-the-dots diagrams, guiding the viewer’s gaze along a path imposed by the sequence of notations, alluding to a directional force that shapes the flow of looking.

Cecilia Caldiera, Under the moon's attraction 1, 2025, blackened steel,
plastic, silk, 32 x 81 x 47 inches. Image courtesy of the artists and Astor Weeks.

Caldiera extends her directional forces in Under the Moon’s Attraction (2025), a series of three sculptural installations referencing tidal rhythms, gravitational pulls, and lunar cycles. Under the Moon’s Attraction 1 features curved blackened steel structures pointing in multiple directions. Viewers find their gazes shifting back and forth—horizontally, diagonally, across the room—like waves crashing and recoiling, colliding at invisible points within the space. In contrast, Under the Moon’s Attraction 2 and 3 orient toward a unified direction, resembling pointing arrows. Variations in height introduce rhythm like strings in a harp, and the addition of silk ribbons tied between structures, swaying with the airflow created a ritual of movement as visitors pass. The directional arrangement operates like choreography: viewers are subtly guided and magnetically drawn toward certain angles or pathways, as if led by gravitational pull. These minimalist, geometric forms place Caldiera in dialogue with Alexander Calder’s kinetic sculptures, which similarly catch the mobile forces that structure our environment.

Cecilia Caldiera, Dust, 2025, glass, wax, paper, wood, plastic, individual discs:
15 1⁄4 x 15 1⁄4 x 3 1⁄2. Installation dimensions variable. 
Image courtesy of the artists and Astor Weeks.

The theme of directionality continues with Dust (2025), a floor-based installation composed of round glass discs arranged across the gallery floor. Almost appearing like floating at first glance, the discs prompt visitors to instinctively adjust their steps, directing their gaze downward and navigating the room in a zigzag motion, like a dragonfly dipping between lily pads. The piece functions as a map without a legend, echoing what Paolo Patelli and Giuditta Vendrame describe in Friction Atlas as “laws of assembly” that shape public behaviour, evident in colourful arrows and diagrams illustrated on the floor in parks and squares. On the other hand, Caldiera’s laws are invisible, creating points of pause, balance, orientation, and recalibration in the spaces in between the discs.

Exhibition view of Oh the way a mineral fractures at Astor Weeks. 
Image courtesy of the artists and Astor Weeks.

Caldiera’s installations behave like instructions encoded into the environment, an approach that aligns with the other artists in the exhibition: the arrow glyphs in Maksud’s musical notations, subway-plan ciphers, embroidered lines resembling geographical borders, and Gladman’s architectural drawings and prose writings, where poems take the shape of built structures. What is most successful about the exhibition is Caldiera’s ability to adopt scientific and mathematical terminology, such as gravitational fields, tidal forces, density, and render it into a language of intuitive motion. She makes the invisible visible: the gentle pull of moon tides, the directional flow of urban construction, the subtle ways bodies orient themselves in relation to cityscapes. Oh the way a mineral fractures invites viewers into a dance with nature and industrial environment, where movement is guided by material clues, shifting gazes, and natural forces. Her works recalibrate perception and act like geological stratification: layers of meaning formed through sedimentation, repetition, and systems of accumulation.

The exhibition was on view at Astor Weeks in NYC from October 15 to November 15, 2025.