f@#K... just had baby just sunk 4000 into this car not mention the 2000 to buy the car and 500 in body work to get on the road.... now 5 days after purchase engine light is on for good.. no problem still zippy lil car and working perfect until 4 months very minimal back and forth driving notlong distances overall ... now sputtters and almost dies around turn take about40 seconds just to get up to 35km/h ....... scary when trying to get thru round abouts and to hospital to see my son i went dealerships one said misfirebegged em to hook up to comuter main guy comes out asks whos hyundia out fronnt i say mie he said move it now ... and had to leave appearntly a chev dealership cant even help a person out like sorry ur the closest auto shop figured have up to date mechanics and equipment that could multi read different models as most b and c gradde shops would have a reader that could identify atleast problem maybe not fix but atleast an idea .. ,,other said coil other said try this sh*t in ur gas tank .. none could hook a computer up before my time was due back at hospitalso had pur sh*t in gas tank and hope for best no my baby momma is drivin to hospital so i can try get some answers as we do not have really another 1000 for this car engine light constantly constantly FLASHING REPEDEATITIVLY !! sorry misspellling so upset worried n no answers elsewere!! AHHH i cant afford all this we just had kid worsdt possible time for car to go kaputs.....and b stranded and not able to get there every few hours ..such complicated stiutaton i wanna cry ....

Amanda Ross-Ho - Eternal Flame
The Pit II, June 12 - July 24
www.the-pit.la

The Body Corporate.
The body corporate discuss issues of joint concern.
Meetings of the body corporate are either general meetings,
or extraordinary general meetings.

Annual general meeting.
(AGM)
The following matters are some examples of what may be discussed at the AGM:
maintenance,
insurance,
expenditure.

Resolutions.
A motion may be decided on at a general meeting of the body corporate by one of two types of resolution.
An ordinary resolution,
or a special resolution.

All resolutions must be recorded in writing.
Resolutions can also be made without a general meeting.

Special resolution.
Ordinary resolution.

Extraordinary general meetings.
(EGM)
A body corporate can also hold EGMs.

Mary Mary is delighted to announce ʻBody Corporate,ʼ a solo exhibition by Gerda Scheepers, her third at the gallery. This new group of works focuses on the idea of an abstract body. A collection of sculptural works, made as a starting point, from generic instant garment closets are installed throughout the space.

Scheepers having re-issued these found objects, their structures both imitated and partially modified, replaces their original covers with ones put together with studio leftovers. In addition some of the joins of the objectsʼ metal frames have been replaced with a 3d printed copy of these original fixings, producing a graphic, skeletal rendering of a knee-cap.

Titles in her work groups are often borrowed from other structural environments in society. The internal structures inherent to them are imitated or modified in a similar way to how the sculptures are treated, transformed from the original, to support the abstract visual narrative.

References to clothing draw upon the exhibitionʼs theme of the body. In conjunction Scheepersʼ materials imitate physical and psychological gestures or postures like being tired, falling apart, having an expression – almost like material ʻactorsʼ in a narrative. In this sense there is an idea of a performative whole in the exhibition though all works act both in combination with each other as well as alone.

The physical and psychological spaces around people and the body as address for the tensions that arise from them, informs the tensions and narratives within her work. Forming part of a simultaneously gestural, physical and formally methodized process, Scheepersʼ relation to materials and the studio is also very much the foundation of her finalised pieces. These works often show their making and notes for making, with gesture, motif and method merged as one layer.

There is often a shifting of roles amongst her many references such as architecture, television, films, furniture and clothing, referencing within them the everyday. Here she continues this part of her process, by including the mundane objects of a generic everyday (in this instance the lo-fi aesthetic of an instant garment closet) and explicitly referencing ʻa bodyʼ (indeed one work here is a depiction of the digestive system).

Gerda Scheepers - Body Corporate
Mary Mary, June 4 - July 30
www.marymarygallery.co.uk

“And thus nothing is left but these enormous movings around. Objects appear and disappear like fins of dolphins on the surface of the sea, and objectness gives way to sheer obsolescence. What is important is no longer the object, a concretion inherited from the codes, but metamorphosis, fluidity. Not a dolphin, but a trail, an energetic trace inscribed on the surface.” (Jean-Francois Lyotard, Energumen Capitalism, New York, 1977)

In 1957, Roland Barthes wrote that “more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation […] it is ubiquity made visible […] less a thing than the trace of a movement.” Today, that ubiquity reaches to the center of our oceans, which are clogged with plastic. And as this plastic gradually breaks down into smaller particles it is swallowed by fish that we end up eating, which is to say, our waste is being fed back to us.

Materials and substances circulate once we dispose of them. They spill out, transform in unpredicted ways or find unexpected applications: birth control pills move through our bodies and into the water, dispersing hormones that can alter the sexes of fish; three-legged frogs emerge as a result of the complex interplay of a diminished ozone layer, agricultural pesticides and pharmaceutical residues; and plastic bags become prized for nest building by birds seeking increased status during courting rituals. Strange metabolisms and forms of re-use characterize the flows of materials as they move from being goods to becoming parts of bodies.

Recently, the term “circular economy” has surfaced for advocating a new way of thinking about the flow of materials. It refers to a logic in which goods are seen as containers for materials that are only temporarily consolidated and will be reclaimed as assets as soon as a product cycle ends. In this future scenario, the status of consumer objects will be one of constant transition. Liquid consumption will replace ownership and intermittent access will replace belonging under the pressure of the constant movement demanded by capitalism – a trend that is already foreshadowed by the current “sharing economy”. Goods are rented, loaned and leased rather than owned by the user; goods become services as their assets, the materials that they contain, need to stay ‘in the hands’ of the companies producing them. Accordingly, much of the work of managing materials within circular economic models will be comprised of surveilling the status of these distributed resources through networked technologies – a situation that raises questions about privacy, data management and growing energy consumption.

In the context of these changing models, the exhibition proposes an understanding of art objects as transient things, assemblages of materials whose destinies remain unknown, and as propositions for assimilation and disintegration. At a time in which the extraction of value from every available asset seems the dominant imperative, the artworks here display forms of waste, non-use and degradation.

Material is regarded as matter that goes beyond the categories of the living and the dead as it creates its own paths on which the organic and the inorganic meet. If control over our bodies is increasingly asserted through chemical substances, and if the movement of goods is subject to more and more surveillance, questions of ownership and access need to be re-thought when it comes to the matter constituting and surrounding our lives. In circular economic thinking, linearity needs to be replaced by circularity. However the exhibition acknowledges more complex forms of material flows: life cycles that cannot be predicted, and material currents that go wayward, run upstream, dry out or disassociate.

The exhibition Otherwise, Unhinged is part of Inflected Object’s second chapter on the topic of Circulation and the third exhibition of the series.

Inflected Objects was initiated with the Istituto Svizzero di Roma. The current exhibition is organized in collaboration with Future Gallery, Berlin and is the second exhibition pertaining to the chapter on Circulation, whose first exhibition was a collaboration with the Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem. The project is financially supported by the Mondriaan Fund.

Exhibiting artists: Nina Beier, Juliette Bonneviot, Nina Canell, Bea Fremderman, Rubén Grilo, Tamen Pérez, Samara Scott, Jenna Sutela, Marianne Vierø, Dan Walwin

Inflected Objects #2 Circulation – Otherwise, Unhinged
Future Gallery, June 26 - July 30
www.futuregallery.org

We’d leave at the break of dawn, even earlier, like 4am to avoid traffic; I was handed this black leather cushion to finish my night on; the streets were dead quiet, on the freeway other cars, other families leaving town; the lunch stop was my favorite, little sandwiches made with so much care, delicately wrapped in tin foil, the ritual of slicing an apple with the sharp folding knife kept in the glove compartment; empty beaches, hair in faces, long dinners playing with portable video games; more video games in the hotel room; all we ever wanted was everything.

-Antoine Donzeaud, Paris, 2016

Exhibiting artists: Nathan Coutts, Antoine Donzeaud, Nick Jeffrey, Brian Kokoska, Jennifer Remenchik, Dylan Spaysky, Michael Stamm, Christian Tedeschi, and Jim Thorell. 

Dark Mimes
Ashes/Ashes, July 9 - August 6
www.ashesonashes.com

It was all written, all predicted, anticipated. It was planned since always, individually, together, globally, at every scale, everywhere, forever. We always knew it, we felt it, it could not be stopped. It was an illusion, a dream, a nightmare, it was a prophecy, it was just written since always. It was in front of us, written on the summits, on the waves, on the stars, it was written in our eyes. It was not buried. It was not light years away, it was light years away. It was deeper, it was inside, you could breath it, you could drink it, since always. It was an e ect, it was a cause, a cycle, a language, it was a sign. It was too late, it was us, since always, since it starts, forever. 

Pierre Clement - Just The Same Infinite
Ultrastudio, July 9 - 24

Contribution by Marialuisa Pastò.

'We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that, reverse it.' 1
'These rocks used to talk to me, they answered my questions.' 2

Anxiety triggers circular thinking, which in turn can trigger circular walking. Overactivity in the right side of our brain can cause a leftward trajectory in our walking motion. The benefit of circular walking ensures that the point of departure is always also the destination and vice versa, allowing for a familiar enough journey which may quell your anxieties enough to forget you are even walking in the first place. The trouble with searching for feelings is that you find them, just as you encounter your own footprints on the second lap of the circle, they appear familiar yet alien at the same time. Of course one would have to assume that enough time has passed, that the circle was large enough to be lost in thoughts long enough to not fully recognise one's own foot prints on meeting them, or indeed, to not even notice one was walking in circles in the first place. The impressions in the soil (assuming the earth is muddy) are like a mirror but not really because they are physical impressions. More than a reflection they are a mould but they are more than that too, a bodily memory on the earth, that exists in all the dimensions. The discomfort caused by this encounter lies in the inability to fully recognise the imprints as one’s own, therefore interpreting them as a threat, a ghoul or monster perhaps. The real horror however occurs in fully recognising the prints as our own, we no longer remember ourselves and in doing so embody the monster we fear. On each turn of the circle a new set of prints are added, spiralling the sense of dread at what lies ahead.

1. Willy Wonka, Willy Wonka & the Choclate Factory (1971) Directed by Mel Stuart. USA.
2. Karamakate, Embrace the Serpent (2015) Directed By Ciro Guerra. Columbia.

Photos by Bruno Lopes.

Dan Rees - Depressed Earth
Múrias Centeno, June 29 - July 30
www.muriascenteno.com

Consciously exploring borders and coming into direct contact with opposites fraught with tension stand at the outset of Tim Plamper’s new work series and they thus also mark the beginning of the exhibition at unttld contemporary. In the autumn of 2014 Tim Plamper embarked on a six-week journey through south-eastern Europe and Turkey, traveling as far as Georgia, all the while following the signs of change in Europe’s border region. He focused his attention on the relicts of the cultural past and the fragmented legacy left behind by political ideologies and upheavals, and how they influence current developments and conflicts. His flat in Istanbul was – to take one example – right in the middle of the Kurdish district and he witnessed the violent altercations between Kurdish protestors and the Turkish police which flared up almost every night, at the very same time the IS was attacking the Syrian-Kurdish city of Kobanî.

Plamper had documented his trip in great detail with his digital camera. But as he tried to send his photos to Germany for an exhibition and hooked up his computer in an internet café, a momentous short circuit ruined the camera’s memory card. All that was left of the digital travel archive was the fragmented sound tracks of video recordings. What remained were the indelible memories and disturbing images etched in his mind. The search for “fragments of everyday change” (Plamper) on Europe’s borders yielded fragmentary impressions at the very limits of the act of remembering.

Soundscape

Back in Germany, he developed sound collages from these remembered images and the surviving audio fragments, collages underpinned by a dystopic atmosphere. He gave the longest of the soundscapes the title “Atlas” (https://soundcloud.com/twentynineminfiftyninesec/tim-plamper-atlas), designating both a geographical as well as a mythological and metaphorical border. The composition’s underlying substrate is formed on the one hand by the rushing waters of the Kura River in Tbilisi with passing ambulance vehicles, and on the other the violent altercations between Kurds and Turkish police in Istanbul with loud shouting, the noise of tear gas being fired, and helicopters circling overhead.

Although he understands it to be an autonomous work, the title-giving sound collage, once considered in interaction with the large-format drawings, has something akin to an explanatory function for Plamper, like an abstract soundtrack to the narrations woven into the pictorial layers. For most people, listening to music triggers images and emotions, which impress their attendant moods onto the process of observation and can lead to projections being cast onto what is being perceived.

Analogies

As with his earlier works, the starting point for the new drawings are digital sketches. A large part of Plamper’s compositions are created on the computer, where in detailed preliminary studies he combines and layers motifs he takes from his extensive photograph and image archive, using a certain degree of artistic freedom to realise them as drawings. In the Atlas series however the decisive moment of transformation is added. As previously mentioned, with the aid of the surviving audio fragments, Plamper has translated the images of his journey imprinted in his memory into soundscapes. In turn, the drawings represent a kind of feedback loop of the acoustic material into a form of visuality. The large-format works are based on the frequency spectrum of the sound collage Plamper has visualised with the help of a periodic function. “The spectrum frequencies of an acoustic signal characterise, on the one hand, its sound, while showing the textures of the rhythmical dynamic of this signal.” (Plamper).

Images of memory turned into sound, sound patterns turned into images – this points to how our memory works and the process of assimilating and remembering. Accordingly, the drawings are not trying to “tell” us something, although they are interwoven with specific content, but rather they show us something, namely the process of recognition, which is closely connected with the process of remembering, for as the American physicist and computer scientist Douglas R. Hofstadter has observed, all thinking is based on analogies. Ultimately, we can only apply the newly perceived to what we already know. The spectrum frequencies will thus remind us of light reflecting on the surface of water or landscapes shrouded in the darkness of night, while in the middle of the abstract lead textures we make out refugee boats, waterfalls or mountain chains. The works are thus about the specific moment when one recognises something in what is represented.

Although Plamper primarily draws, he works with the classical parameters of the painter, with the processes of applying and removing layers, the interplay between real and illusory space, etc. Naturally enough, the depth of the material in the medium of drawing is played out in millimetres. Before embarking on the drawing process, Plamper scratches into the raw paper cipher-like structures and occasionally words. As a result, the pigment can only partially, or at times not at all, permeate these scratched indentations. This approach reveals his aim – to explore the boundary separating the motif from the material, the meta-space between the paper and the pigment, the space where meaning entrenches itself. Recently, he has attempted to define this space more clearly by – in the manner of a collage – splitting up and overlaying it. For example: new non-representational motifs emerge out of the overlaying at the intersections of the respective cut surfaces and they cultivate their own reality.

Association and dissociation

The manifold layering and overlaying, combined with Plamper’s paradigmatic working method of adding and removing, allows a complex reference system of entanglement and disentanglement to arise, one that manifests itself in the double movement at the heart of networking: associating and dissociating. On the one hand, the phenomena of the present are knitted together with elements drawn from one’s own past and imagination; on the other, the attempt is made to disentangle by taking a dissociating approach, so as to then describe these phenomena from a position of distance. The conscious shifting between the two states of being bound and being distant is – as explicated by Rahel Jaeggi and Tilo Wesche – an essential characteristic of critical thinking: “Critique always means simultaneously dissociation and association. It discerns, disconnects, distances itself; and it links, sets itself in relationship to, produces connections. In other words, it is a dissociation out of association and an association out of dissociation.” [1]

We live in an age in which everything and everyone are networked together, an age in which people are increasingly perceiving themselves as part of a web that spans the whole world, a web they share with one another, but a web that also separates them – it connects and disconnects them simultaneously. Tim Plamper has found images for this complex structure of our present age, images which are both socially relevant and aesthetically densely woven.

- Roman Grabner, 2016

[1] Rahel Jaeggi/Tilo Welsche, Einleitung: Was ist Kritik. In: Rahel Jaeggi/Tilo (Hg.), Was ist Kritik? Frankfurt/Main 2009, S. 7-20, .8.

Tim Plamper - Atlas
Unttld Contemporary, July 1 - August 27
www.unttld-contemporary.com

 

Galleria Acappella is pleased to announce a group exhibition titled Le domaine enchanté curated by Domenico de Chirico featuring works by Sebastian Burger, Alex Chaves, Leon Eisermann, Sayre Gomez, Morgan Mandalay, Orion Martin, Alexandra Noel, Zoé de Soumagnat.

Le saboteur tranquille (1898 – 1967) arguably the most influential figure in Belgian Surrealism, has succeeded in painting pictures— often imbued with dark humour—that channel those obsessions and feelings of eeriness and displacement that arise when seeking an answer to the mystery of life and when trying to work out the processes of thought and human perceptions.

René Magritte has elected painting as his preferred means of investigation. He goes about it by raising doubts on reality itself and addressing totality as a mystery, never seeking to define it. Nor does he ever reach other dimensions, since his idea of absurdity does not inhabit the realms of the unknown or the utopic, but it is found instead in day-to-day reality.

For this reason, his image —obsessively recurrent and ambiguously ironic— is primarily a reproduction of what occurs in reality but on top of that, it is also an illusionary joke, articulated through a visual language characterized by utter simplicity of enunciation and stylistic immediacy.

Enigma, nonsense, irrationality and displacement in the realm of the symbols, images and patterns that inhabit the subconscious are the conceits surrealism has wilfully conveyed.

This whole exhibition is freely inspired, both in a surrealistic and in a metaphorical way, by René Magritte's mural painting 'Le domaine enchanté' (1953 circa, Knokke-le-Zoute, Casino, Belgium): among the most emblematic pieces in his oeuvre, a large scale and paramount summary of his main iconographical leitmotif. 

Exhibiting artists: Sebastian Burger, Alex Chaves, Zoé De Soumagnat, Leon Eisermann, Sayre Gomez, Morgan Mandalay, Alexandra Noel, Orion Martin

Curated by Domenico de Chirico.
Photos by Danilo Donzelli. 

Le domaine enchanté
Galleria Acapella, July 15 - October 10
www.museoapparente.eu

The Greek painter Yorgos Stamkopoulos hasn’t touched a paintbrush in nearly ten years. And indeed, when you behold one of his works, what you see isn’t necessarily a painting at all, but the physical remnants of an invisible act. So Mr. Stamkopolous, what is the painting? On a recent studio visit, he dropped a tensile plastic tangle at my feet. Here was my answer: pure material. For Stamkopoulos, painting is not an accumulation of pre-meditated gestures plotted out on a canvas, nor is it an expressive act. Painting is instead something that is removed from the canvas, while his art is that which remains. At first glance, the gaudy skein of plastics seems to posses little relationship to the sleek, minimal canvases that lined the walls of his Berlin studio in preparation for his forthcoming exhibition at Galerie Halgand. However, this enigmatic interplay between process and material forms one of the most compelling aspects of Stamkopoulos’ practice.

For several years now, Stamkopoulos has described his process as “blind painting.” Each of the works in his exhibition Soul Remains begins with a simple, gestural line drawing. This first mark signals both the beginning and the end of the artist’s control over the canvas. Eschewing prescribed outcomes, he alternates airbrushing with applying layers of masking material, which he then peels off to reveal the composition that results from multiple layers of masking and spraying: a kind of camouflage in reverse. This technique of creation through destruction resonates with the work of historical decollage artists like Raymond Hains, Jacques Villeglé, and Mimmo Rotella. Yet while these figures intervened in advertising images to create gritty, lacerated surfaces, Stamkopolous’ adapts this process to more lyrical, ambiguous ends. A phantom liveliness pervades the work in the exhibition. Born of accident and chance these canvases not only contain the trace of the artist’s sole gesture, but also the vestiges of process-based material reactions. While some of the masked areas are blank, others bear a ghostly imprint of lingering materials—almost as if the painting captured itself in the process of disappearing, offering a glimpse of its soul remains.

Text by Jesi Khedivi.
Photos by Julian Mullan. 

Yorgos Stamkopoulos - Soul Remains
Galerie Nathalie Halgand, June 29 - July 30
www.galeriehalgand.com

Christiane Löhr (b. 1965), who lives and works in Prato (Italy) and Cologne (Germany), creates light yet complex sculpture and architecture from natural materials. These works are striking for their highly varied size and composition; they can function as autarkic images as well as elements within a space. Permanence and Löhr’s materials’ inherent volatility or temporality find a particular and highly poetic connection in her works. For her first solo exhibition presentation in Switzerland, Löhr is developing a route following works through the Kabinett galleries of the Kunsthaus Baselland. There will also be new works on view which have been created on site by the artist with selected organic materials, works that enter a dialogue with the architectural givens of the Kunsthaus.

„(...) Contrary to the heaviness and the physical and environmental gravity of much contemporary sculpture, the aspiration of this German artist is to express (...) a sense of delicacy and evanescence, softness and lightness. She narrates the sensitive, euphoric quality of vegetable and animal vibrancy and its alteration, which is entrusted to her tactful, tender attention. These slight, delicate sculptures give body to foamy, floating forms whose fascinating tactile presence create a luminous harmony in their context. Hers is an art that gives rise to volumes and images seductive in skin-like softness and the blooming of substances. An art gentle and at the same time potent, expressing the drama of the calm of material transformed by stupendous, vigorous expression to revivify our modes of feeling and conceiving sculpture.“ (Germano Celant, in: L’Espresso, Rome, No. 24, 17.6.2010)

In his solo presentation Jonathan Monk (b. 1969, lives in Rome and Berlin) will engage explicitly with the conditions of an exhibition. What part does the model of a planned exhibition play? What might the possibilities be for an artist if all their works and prior exhibition situations were available to them and could be integrated without having to avail of the help of collectors, galleries or an extensive exhibition budget either? What are the expectations an artist is exposed to, be they from without or from the artist himself or herself, in realising a solo exhibition that takes place during the course of the internationally renowned ART Basel fair to boot? Which questions can be posed at this moment in time in particular? Last but not least come questions of the original, copy and reinterpretation which the internationally active artist Monk poses in his works, often fundamentally challenging them with humour and serious thought too. The media that he applies vary according to the questions he poses and the chosen topic, and range from photography, film, performance, video, sculpture, mail art to the use of everyday production and communication methods.

“(...) The challenge lies in consciously and ironically embracing the inspirations and anecdotes of modern and contemporary art which had led Monk to propose his own alternative models of the artist in particular and the way art is interpreted in general. Whenever Monk is demythifying creation, there is always a clear interest in the undifferentiated role of the artist. With considerable humor and a deep understanding of the implication of social reality in the work of art, Monk is addressing the human trace and mythical destiny, at the same time raising questions linked to “contexts” and “non- contexts,” identity and so on, notions which, nowadays, are significant contributors
to the mechanism of modern art.(...)” (Evelyne Jouanno, in: Flash Art 98).

Jan van der Ploeg (b. 1959, lives in Amsterdam) is currently one of the best-known contemporary artists in the field of mural painting. For his first institutional appearance in Switzerland he will develop two new work cycles specifically for the Kunsthaus Baselland. These will occupy several hundred square metres of the Kunsthaus’ ground level and enable not just privileged insight into his creative practice but also reveal the enormous potential of his work. The two work cycles are, on the one hand, representative of his works, but on the other hand they also signal an important new direction in his practice: creating a dynamic dialogue with a given situation so that the boundaries between wall drawing, painting, sculpture and architecture disappear.

‘‘Brilliant, imposing, pulsating, grandiose, occupying the whole space’ – these are the words and phrases that pop up all the time in reviews and commentaries on Jan van der Ploeg’s wall painting. [...] Jan van der Ploeg’s wall painting are perhaps something like a projection space, a visual echo chamber, that makes something tangible: that abstraction and geometry are among the most elementary forms of expression in art and culture.’

(Excerpt from Renate Wiehanger’s text in the catalogue which will be published in Spring 2016).

Christiane Löhr, Jonathan Monk, Jan van der Ploeg
Kunsthaus Baselland, May 27 - July 17

Contribution by Marialuisa Pastò.

Filippo Minelli is best known for his series of photographs, Silence Shapes, which shows brightly colored smoke bombs exploding in abandoned landscapes and non-descript urban environments. The smoke bombs lend beauty to the surroundings while at times, they also infuse the landscape with a whiff of danger.

The Italian artist was inspired by political demonstrations that he glimpsed on TV while channel surfing on mute. Smoke-granades had just been set off, shrouding the participants in smoke. The image caught his attention: Minelli felt there was something mysterious and thrilling about it.

Minelli‘s images have an ambiguous character; they do not overtly suggest protest or war but something less tangible — politics at a more introspective level. The sentiment is similar in Bold Statements, Minelli‘s current series of performances and installations at Ruttkowski;68, that echoes the themes of Silence Shapes as well.

Filippo Minelli - Bold Statements
Ruttkowski;68, June 6 - July 24
www.ruttkowski68.com

Galeria Presença is currently exhibiting Less than Objects - an exhibition by Pedro Matos in Oporto, Portugal in collaboration with Underdogs Gallery in Lisbon, where it was first exhibited earlier this year.  

On the face of it, the body of works presented in “Less than Objects” seems, in all, to explore only the domain of abstraction, but what Pedro Matos shows us here is that this abstraction contains, too, the representation of something. Weaving a skilful reflection based on undervalued elements present in the material reality, of both human and natural origin, that surrounds us, the exploration which the artist undertakes of the interstices between representation and abstraction expresses an intentional articulation between one and the other that seeks to elevate the latter to a status in all equal to that of the former. By recreating and transposing disparaged material elements to a space of aesthetic contemplation, the artist translates the abstract quality of the texture of the random, of imperfection, of decay and mutation, as well as the existing correlations between human action and the effect of nature, into proposals that suggest their sublimation and acceptance.

Working the depuration of these frontier elements, of this formal and conceptual ambiguity present in the reality of the objects he highlights, Pedro Matos seeks to make us focus our gaze on that which frequently, in its original context, is ignored, stressing the singular and ephemeral beauty it contains in itself. “Less than Objects” is, in this way, an indagation into the nature of elements that are not really complete objects, but also into the intangible issues they contain, into their quality as conduits for ideas or aggregators of content, into, in short, the contemplation of a poetic significance that transcends their physical appearance.

Photos by Bruno Lopes.

Pedro Matos - Less Than Objects
Galeria Presença, June 18 - September 17
www.galeriapresenca.pt

Céline Condorelli has developed an extensive body of work by developing possibilities for ways of living and working together and enquiring into property relations and everyday life, which addresses notions such as public space, institutions, politics, the commons, fiction, and articulation. Céline Condorelli’s practice is committed to the continuing exploration of less explicit elements of structures and framing mechanisms through which an individual engages with the world – be they cultural, economic, material, social, or political– the apparatuses of visibility often taken for granted that she calls ‘support structures’. Her works “focus on the action of showing itself, in its material, temporal nature, precisely because the act of showing implies boundaries and classifications, taboos and hierarchies. In other words, there is always the implicit awareness of an organized visibility that comes to be institutionalized, to be inscribed on social space, even though it may set off from a simple exhibition support”.[1]

For Concrete Distractions, elements in the exhibition are conceived as portals, boundaries or thresholds; acting simultaneously as obstacle and point of access. A screen blocks the entrance into the institution while a curtain spatially reconfigures the entire exhibition space. Condorelli presents and problematises what can be perceived as very simple, or even banal spatial devices, which in fact establish binary systems of visibility operating through the logic of inclusion and exclusion, of hiding and revealing, of granting and refusing access, dividing space and time.

A series of spinning tops are located in the office space, and relate directly to Lina Bo Bardi's proposal for what a museum should contain: a collection, popular culture and a playground. Condorelli’s interest in playgrounds also develops from their possibility to allow an intimacy with form which is usually forbidden from cultural objects. The spinning tops in Concrete Distractions function simultaneously as scale models for possible carousels (and other past and future playgrounds) and as elements allowing Kunsthalle Lissabon's office to become a playground itself, inviting staff and visitors alike to play with them.

Photos by Bruno Lopes.

Céline Condorelli - Concrete Distractions
Kunsthalle Lissabon, June 24 - October 1
www.kunsthalle-lissabon.org

[1]           From How Things Appear: Celine Condorelli’s Counter-Display, by Marco Scotini, in the forthcoming Céline Condorelli, bau bau, Mousse publishing, 2016.

¿Cómo te voy a olvidar? / How could I forget you? takes its title from the leading cumbia group Los Angeles Azules, whose melody played over our two years of intense research in Mexico. From our visits to artist workshops in Mexico City, Oaxaca, Monterrey or Guadalajara, from Michoacán to Chiapas and the Yucatán, at residencies, institutions, and galleries... This song accompanied us everywhere, with the artists, while travelling, or in the streets: for us it is the refrain of an intense and passionate Mexico.

¿Cómo te voy a olvidar? presents the work of sixteen artists from the new Mexican generation: Gwladys Alonzo, Edgardo Aragón, Ana Bidart, Pia Camil, José León Cerrillo, Jose Dávila, Yann Gerstberger, Fritzia Irízar, Dr. Lakra, Gonzalo Lebrija, Jorge Méndez Blake, Ariel Orozco, Tania Pérez Córdova, Gabriel Rico, Martin Soto Climent and Tercerunquinto, who succeeded Damián Ortega or Gabriel Orozco. Aged between 25 to 40 years old, they have the common quality of being linked or connected to Mexico, whether as country of origin or as adopted home.

The exhibition includes approximately sixty works (installations, videos, paintings, photographs, ceramics, collages), and takes place in all 3 of the Galerie Perrotin’s spaces, in which each artist is invited to occupy a room in order to freely present their universe.

¿Cómo te voy a olvidar? brings together works that are elegant and full of reserve; many of them are new productions, acting as microhistories encapsulating oral narratives and traditions, avoiding all forms of political or necropolitical visual violence. The artists by turns question notions of modernity, identity, citizenship, and rituals: coded messages in the form of personal narratives, interrupted stories, and fragments of dialogue. They make intimacy, contemplation, and subversion interact. Some reinterpret sociocultural landscapes through literature, architecture, or fiction, while others reconsider the legacy and ideologies of modernism, as well as systems of graphic languages.

The exhibition unfolds in the form of a long crossing that begins in the spaces located in the rue de Turenne. In the entrance, 6 blurry drawings by the Tercerunquinto collective represent an eagle devouring a snake on a Barbary fig tree, the result of an action where friends and colleagues erased the lines of the national coat of arms. A little further along, the ceramics of Pia Camil are inspired by the billboards abandoned throughout Mexico. Pia Camil appropriates bands of color or fragments of a letter or number, and transforms these ads into household objects, emphasizing the shortcomings of consumer life through a playful but also critical gesture.

Jose Dávila proposes a series of new sculptures and cutouts, whose purpose is to create a functionalist appreciation of physics in order to reflect on structure as an artistic composition, and geometry as a guiding line and source of creation. 

José Léon Cerrillo continues with an in situ installation that divides the space with superimposed layers, putting the construction of abstraction into perspective through the use of point of view and perception. Each frame functions both simultaneously and separately in the space, creating different angles to proceed through. 

For Tania Pérez Córdova, absence and immateriality occupy the same space as the object, and supplement its meaning. Recounting stories is crucial: each of the works is coupled with an action reflecting different forms of typical social behavior, especially the use of contact lenses as a means of differentiation. 

With regard to Ana Bidart, she is interested in objects that are not necessarily visible: passports, empty crates, packaging material, bar codes, tracking numbers, shipping details, strips of tape, and residue of all sorts, and carries them from their original lives toward new ones. 

On the second floor, Fritzia Irízar offers an allegorical variation on the Phrygian cap to discuss the creation and disappearance of universal political symbols in the collective imagination. She suggests a debate on democracy and the constant repetition of history. 

In all popular cultures, beyond questions of politics, celebrations hold a special place. Martin Soto Climent has concentrated his research on Mexico’s vital need for “la Fiesta,” an archaic ritual celebrating life and its self-renewal. He uses jeans (Mezclilla in Spanish), the most common article of clothing, which erases borders and social distinctions. 

Jorge Méndez Blake has created a new socio-cultural space revolving around the work of Georges Perec, one that is structured around the analysis of the everyday, including recourse to observation and autobiography, as well as a taste for stories. He reexamines the way in which we construct our cultural heritage by creating new connections between literature and architecture. 

At the entrance to the Saint-Claude space are a sculpture and a drawing by Dr. Lakra: an enhanced pin-up, a grotesque erotic-kitsch carnival, mixing former rituals and hallucinogenic visions with a subversive humor on the connection between life, death, and desire. 

Yann Gertsberger, Gwladys Alonzo, and Gabriel Rico use artisanal craft as a means of surpassing the codes of modernism. The installations of Gabriel Rico are made up of neon lights, tree branches, brass rods, and stuffed animals bought at second-hand markets, and are assembled in a way as to question our relation to nature. The geometric form associated with an animal or organic form invites us towards a spiritual experience, to contact with a non-discernible reality. Gwladys Alonzo uses the tiles that adorn the façades and sidewalks of Guadalajara, and that make up the architectural identity of the city, or gathers the painted stones that mark roads in the Mexican countryside. Yann Gerstberger glues cotton fibers with industrial fabrics found in markets, and takes inspiration from the motifs of Mexican popular culture, art history, and nature.The film “Exterminio” by Edgardo Aragón is steeped in a deceptive calm, and shows beautiful landscapes 

along the Pacific coast, but as the video unfolds, details accumulate, so many warnings gesturing towards a somber story. His approach to landscape recalls the “fukeiron” or the “theory of the landscape,” in which all of the landscapes we encounter daily, even those worthy of a postcard, are the expression of the power structures in place. 

The installation of Gonzalo Lebrija, which uses 4 16mm films, presents in each of them a magnificent landscape with a small figure, the artist himself, who enters the frame and then runs away from the camera as fast as possible, suggesting a provocation or a distance that cannot be made up, an invitation to follow him and fill the gap. 

This selection of artists formulates hypotheses regarding the basis of our experience and our encounters with the actors of the Mexican art world, which for a number of years has been seen as one of the new forces in contemporary art. ¿Cómo te voy a olvidar? attempts to give an account of the country’s complexity and influences, in relation to its conquests as well as its proximity to the United States and South America: a multicutural crossroad open to the world.

Exhibiting artists: Gwladys Alonzo, Edgardo Aragón, Ana Bidart, Pia Camil, José León Cerrillo, Jose Dávila, Yann Gerstberger, Fritzia Irízar, Dr. Lakra, Gonzalo Lebrija, Jorge Méndez Blake, Ariel Orozco, Tania Pérez Córdova, Gabriel Rico, Martin Soto Climent and Tercerunquinto. 

Curated by Anissa Touati & Peggy Leboeuf.

¿ CÓMO TE VOY A OLVIDAR ?
Galerie Perrotin, June 10 - July 30
www.perrotin.com

Contribution by Marialuisa Pastò.

Works by Ricardo Baruzzi, Ryan Mrozowzski and Leonor Serrano Rivas expand the notion of line and its transformation across disciplines. Lines as thoughts. Movements, which extend beyond flatness and weave into our real time and space.

Riccardo Baruzzi (1976, IT) studied Painting at the Fine Arts Academy of Ravenna, IT. He recently won the Termoli Prize 2016. Among the artist’s solo shows: P420, Bologna, IT (2016); Spazio O’, Milan, IT (2014); Careof, Milan, IT (2012); he has also shown at MAMbo, Bologna, IT (2016); Neon Campobase, Bologna, IT (2011); Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool, UK (2011); Lucie Fontaine, Milan, IT; Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, UK (2010). He lives and works in Bologna.

Ryan Mrozowski (1981, US) received his MFA from the Pratt Institute in 2005, and his BFA from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2003. Recent solo exhibitions include those at On Stellar Rays, New York (2016); Art in General, Vilnius, LT (2014). Recent group exhibitions include those at Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, SE (2016); Salon 94, New York, US (2015); Lucien Terras, New York, US (2015); Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, US (2015). He lives and works in New York.

Leonor Serrano Rivas (1986, SP) studied Architecture (2004-2012) and Fine Arts (2004-11) at the Universidad Europea de Madrid, SP. She received her MFA from Goldsmith’s University, London in 2015. She was recently awarded with ARCO 2016 Young Artist Award Solán de Cabras and New Contemporaries ICA London. Recent exhibitions include: Liverpool Biennale, UK (2016); Collection of Russian Museum St. Petersburg/Málaga, SP (2016); ICA London (2016); MUPAM, Malaga, SP (2016); (solo) Sala Santa Isabel, Seville, SP (2016); (solo) Marta Cervera, Madrid, SP (2016); Tiro al Blanco, Guadalajara, Mexico (2015); (solo) Espaidos, Terrassa, Barcelona, ES (2014); (performance) Serpentine Galleries (2014); CentroCentro, Madrid, SP (2014); La Casa Encendida, Madrid, SP (2014 /ES). She lives and works in London.

I Hear You Singing In The Wire
Arcade, June 24 - July 30
www.arcadefinearts.com

Exo Exo, Paris, and Lodos, Mexico City, have integrated activities. At a macro level both acknowledge the broader responsibility to develop a new kind of engagement. At the micro level it remains necessary to promote additional points of view while looking for willing partners as a means of building alliances and building coalitions. As a gap opens up within the engagement, between expectation and product, it creates a space for alternative visions. What we see play out is a battle of ideas within a common agenda. It is a battle that ultimately is a challenge to consensus and a challenge to the interconnectedness both are committed to. This is not to conclude the engagement as ineffectual in furthering the collective interests; rather it invites a time for sober second thoughts and doses of pragmatism.

Michael Debatty is an artist working in Liège.
Noah Barker is an artist working in New York.
Exo Exo is a curatorial program and a non-for-profit exhibition space in Paris.
Lodos is an exhibition space in Mexico City.

Michael Debatty and Noah Barker
Exo Exo, June 23 - 30
www.exoexo.xyz

Reconstructive Memory is an English term borrowed from cognitive psychology meaning that memory is not a faithful reproduction of past events but rather a mental faculty based on recollection- reconstruction processes. Depending on our emotions, our level of tiredness, our beliefs, we may reconstruct episodes from our lives in a way that leads to distortions, alterations and false memories.

Since the invention of computers, the data-storage race has been generating technological debates. The machines are obliged to keep offering more memory to enable us to preserve our own. Like a search engine, our brain uses this external memory more and more, and invents strategies to free itself from the overload of amassed information. It therefore knows where to find the details it needs, without needing to store the contents: a new way to operate our encephalon, approaching a form of artificial intelligence.

It has now become a habit on the internet: documentation precedes exhibition visits. Those immaculate images purged of all imperfections circulate quickly, often substituting for the works, which must be photogenic above all. In Reconstructive Memory, we further accentuate the difference between the physical encounter with the pieces and their discovery through documentation. In fact, although we are able to get close to the works in the gallery, the experience behind the screen is disrupted by large printed transparent filters placed in the axis of the pieces hung on the gallery walls, allowing only a partial view of these.

Whether it be the paintings that Gina Beavers has carefully modelled and painted based on photographs gleaned on Google images; poetic collages by Hayley Tompkins made up of re- photographed advertisements arranged on galvanized metal panels; thermally moulded intestinal paintings by Nicolas Deshayes; sculpted paint by Michael Assiff; varnished, melancholic paintings by Philipp Timischl; or the woven digital image by Travess Smalley, the works presented in the space are hard to understand by means of a two-dimensional image. Beyond their meaning, they were chosen for their complex materiality and appear muddled, as if they had poorly digested their transfer to the screen. Fleshy, corporeal, reflecting our own anatomy, they make Reconstructive Memory an exhibition you want to roam, explore, even touch. 

The large-format prints placed in the visitor’s field of vision were made from Galerie Valentin’s photographic archives. During the consultation period, our own memories of visits to rue Saint-Gilles resurfaced. We were gripped by the specificities of the place and the hanging automatisms that led successive photographs to produce five recurring viewing angles. Collages created by superimposing and deforming dozens of exhibition views are seen as memory interfaces, mnesic traces of the past thirteen years. Taking as their very subject the place in which they have been set up, these porous screens oscillate between scenographic elements and contextual sculptures. These ambiguous filters, conceived as pieces that condition access to the works and unsettle visitors, act as revelatory reproductions offering a new perspective on the work of the invited artists.

The exhibition follows Screen Play (SWG3 Gallery, Glasgow 2014); Deep Screen (Parc Saint-Léger, Pougues-les-Eaux 2015) and Show Room (Glassbox, Paris 2015) and is part of an exploration of methods of producing, installing, apprehending and distributing an exhibition. Reconstructive Memory offers two simultaneous experiences that are different and complementary at the same time. Although coming to the gallery will still make it possible to have a special relationship with the works, the online visit, a genuine exhibition project in its own right, will be no less unique and original. Whichever experience is had, our memory will inexorably make sure to change our recollection of it. 

Exhibiting artists: Michael Assiff, Gina Beavers, Nicolas Deshayes, Philipp Timischl, Hayley Tompkins and Travess Smalley.
Curated by: It's Our Playground.

Reconstructive Memory
Galerie Valentin, July 1 - July 23
www.galeriechezvalentin.com

Late Saturday night we’ve only risk management. The spinning of our given moment’s scenarios. Hitting the bed and its dark, cold and we bugs reach for each other. Dumb and blind we fuck. Sharpened genitals penetrate body cavities, splitting lower abdomens and coming straight there. Punching holes in torsos, there’s traumas in the sheets. We men fuck all hopefully, fuck each other accidentally. Women evolved some small defence against this all, a mass of cells spawns up; swells around to seal their wounds. The sperm an antiseptic softens and soothes the blow some. For us men though its different, we die in those sheets, pathogens spread wild. 

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life - to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we won’t land anymore. 

It was not really Saturday night, at least it may have been, we had long lost count of the days; but always if we wanted to do anything special we said it’s Saturday night, and then we did it. He would come down laughing over something fearfully funny he had been saying to a star, but he had already forgotten what it was. Coming up with mermaid scales still sticking to him, and yet not be able to to say for certain what had been happening. Everything in life is just for a while, but, often it was just like this. 

When you wake in the morning, the naughtinesses and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind, and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on. 

We burn on recurrences, brand and obsession, snapshots, pangs. All the meanings change. We can’t stop. I’m trying in a way to tell you a dream - splurging a vain attempt, because no relation of my dream can convey its dream-sensation, that mingle of absurd¬ity, surprise, and bewilderment. All tight in a tremor of struggling revolt, captured by the incredible; the very essence of a dream. Its impossibilities. It’s impossible to convey in-mo¬ment-life-sensations, its meaning-its subtle and penetrating vapours. I guess the moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.

- Isaac Lythgoe

Almanac is delighted to present 5225 Figueroa Mountain Rd, a solo show by British artist Isaac Lythgoe. The works band together to celebrate the birth of the cool, and resist its growing up – growing up poor, growing up man¬aged, growing up in the art world. Captured behind the screen, the protagonists of this world have become prisoner to a forbidden desire for simultaneous blackness and whiteness. Impossible to consummate, their bodies are shielded by a transparent boundary of childhood ritual, an endless repetition of pillow talk and nursery rhymes. 

Walking in the shadow of violence and luxury, the emotional labour of so many manager/agents produces an inventory of lines of flight (Egyptian cotton, filtered water, chupa chups and cola). Sheltered by the innards of a commercial framework, me¬ticulously curated, the glass ceiling of celebrity serves as an inverted mirror. The cruelty of adolescence and the promise of the future become the greatest threat, the intimacy of the bed refined to the cerebral gaze, and freedom is nothing but choreography. 

A necessary and known evil, these bodies are shaped by the seductive architectures of artifice, an empty sexuality reveling in sugar-pop culture, cheap tricks and magic. The physical body is barely needed for this performance – the avatar of the female nude in painting morphed into the zombie-cyborg ancestor of the nineties white cube. Andy Warhol would not have known what to do with this much space, let alone Titian. Floating on air, walking on the moon. Inflatable promises, inexistent supports.

Text by Astrid Korporaal

Isaac Lythgoe - 5225 Figueroa Mountain Rd
Almanac Projects, June 26 - July 30
www.almanacprojects.com

Brand New Gallery is pleased to announce a group exhibition titled ‘Life Eraser’ curated by Domenico de Chirico featuring works by Cornelia Baltes, Rachel De Joode, Jennie Jieun Lee, Anne Neukamp, Ruth Root and Shinique Smith.

The theory concerning the Manipulation of Corporeality is strictly connected to historical and social changes that include a metamorphosis of aesthetic and verbal codes as a starting point for a deeper investigation about the subject. Corporeality affirms itself as a research field for every kind of transformation.

In the Nineties, thanks to research in new technologies, we observed a long process in which the body was remoulded. These new body shapes were connected to developments in biotechnology and bio-politics. In the process we also attended to a modification and a loss of human values.

The self-perception of one’s body acquired a new refined and “digital” outlook. This new altered sensitivity is a new kind of aesthetic perception of contemporary change.

We are still in the process of shaping the dynamics of our identity. The conjunction between the lived-in body and the represented body will allow us to metaphorically define the contemporary body redesigned by genetic engineering.

Exhibiting artists: Cornelia Baltes, Rachel De Joode, Jennie Jieun Lee, Anne Neukamp, Ruth Root and Shinique Smith.
Curated by: Domenico de Chirico.

Life Eraser
Brand New Gallery, June 30 - September 10
www.brandnew-gallery.com