David Panos
16 Jan - 07 Mar 2015
DAVID PANOS
The Dark Pool
16 January - 7 March 2015
Albert Baronian is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of David Panos in Brussels, entitled “The Dark Pool”. David Panos presents a body of work that draws together stage improvisation, manipulated HD video and sculptural assemblages to explore the theatrics of the commodity form.
The work was initiated with filmed improvisations at the occupied Teatro Valle in Rome where performers and technicians worked with a number of randomly selected items from the inhabited theatre (Ikea tables, lamps, camping mats etc.). This material formed the basis of an evolving formal language that explores how materiality and metaphysics are compounded in our experience of objects.
Whether shown in flux in video, or frozen in printed perspex and interpenetrated with fragmented consumer goods, Panos’ repeated motifs of objects and body parts evoke the secret domain of the commodity. A ‘Dark Pool’ is an opaque forum for financial trading where transactions are invisible to the public and the artist imagines subject/object relations as a surreal, veiled universe of illusion where full access to the object or the physical processes that constitute it is denied. In these works multiple references are collided and turned in on each other, drawing together fleeting allusions and registers; the mechanics of the theatre become symbols of capital’s magical staging of reality; green screened bodies become abstracted into twisted vectors of flesh, mass produced materials are mutated and recombined into new objects of desire or left wrapped in protective films that obscure their allure, the ghosted marks of labour left etched on their surface.
The repeated image of the green screen in Panos’ work is a signifier of abstract exchangeability. By misusing the software designed to seamlessly remove the green screen and replace it with another image he creates a visceral yet spectral vision of objects and bodies consumed by a ghostly green goo. This evocation of an abstracting abstract substance is inspired by Marx’s use of term Gallerte (Gelatine) to describe the ‘abstract human labour’ that lies congealed within objects, poetic jargon that hints at a visceral process of physical decomposition and reconstitution. The Dark Pool is a confection of dissolving parts, suspended in frozen abstraction.
David Panos is a London-based artist who works with video, installations and sound. He uses digital video, assemblage and performance to probe our contemporary relationship with the commodity form; the indistinct boundaries between the material and the abstract, and the intensification of capital subsumption across culture and experience. He has also worked in collaboration with Anja Kirschner and the duo were the winners of the Jarman Award in 2011 for their long form films and installations that look at history, actualisation, performance, art and power.
Recent solo shows include: Liste, Basel 2014, Artists’ Film Club, ICA, London 2014, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, 2013; Secession, Vienna, 2012; Artist Space, New York, 2012; castillo/corrales, Paris, 2011; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, 2011; Kunsthall Oslo, Oslo, 2011
Selected group shows: Acting Truthfully Under the Circumstances, Tenderpixel, London, 2014, Metal: AV Festival 14, 2014, The Magic of the State, Lisson Gallery, London 2013; Liverpool Biennial, 2012 and British Art Show 7. David Panos (with Anja Kirschner) is the winner of the 2011 Jarman award.
Born in 1971 in Athens (GR)
Lives and Works in London (UK)
The Dark Pool
16 January - 7 March 2015
Albert Baronian is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of David Panos in Brussels, entitled “The Dark Pool”. David Panos presents a body of work that draws together stage improvisation, manipulated HD video and sculptural assemblages to explore the theatrics of the commodity form.
The work was initiated with filmed improvisations at the occupied Teatro Valle in Rome where performers and technicians worked with a number of randomly selected items from the inhabited theatre (Ikea tables, lamps, camping mats etc.). This material formed the basis of an evolving formal language that explores how materiality and metaphysics are compounded in our experience of objects.
Whether shown in flux in video, or frozen in printed perspex and interpenetrated with fragmented consumer goods, Panos’ repeated motifs of objects and body parts evoke the secret domain of the commodity. A ‘Dark Pool’ is an opaque forum for financial trading where transactions are invisible to the public and the artist imagines subject/object relations as a surreal, veiled universe of illusion where full access to the object or the physical processes that constitute it is denied. In these works multiple references are collided and turned in on each other, drawing together fleeting allusions and registers; the mechanics of the theatre become symbols of capital’s magical staging of reality; green screened bodies become abstracted into twisted vectors of flesh, mass produced materials are mutated and recombined into new objects of desire or left wrapped in protective films that obscure their allure, the ghosted marks of labour left etched on their surface.
The repeated image of the green screen in Panos’ work is a signifier of abstract exchangeability. By misusing the software designed to seamlessly remove the green screen and replace it with another image he creates a visceral yet spectral vision of objects and bodies consumed by a ghostly green goo. This evocation of an abstracting abstract substance is inspired by Marx’s use of term Gallerte (Gelatine) to describe the ‘abstract human labour’ that lies congealed within objects, poetic jargon that hints at a visceral process of physical decomposition and reconstitution. The Dark Pool is a confection of dissolving parts, suspended in frozen abstraction.
David Panos is a London-based artist who works with video, installations and sound. He uses digital video, assemblage and performance to probe our contemporary relationship with the commodity form; the indistinct boundaries between the material and the abstract, and the intensification of capital subsumption across culture and experience. He has also worked in collaboration with Anja Kirschner and the duo were the winners of the Jarman Award in 2011 for their long form films and installations that look at history, actualisation, performance, art and power.
Recent solo shows include: Liste, Basel 2014, Artists’ Film Club, ICA, London 2014, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, 2013; Secession, Vienna, 2012; Artist Space, New York, 2012; castillo/corrales, Paris, 2011; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, 2011; Kunsthall Oslo, Oslo, 2011
Selected group shows: Acting Truthfully Under the Circumstances, Tenderpixel, London, 2014, Metal: AV Festival 14, 2014, The Magic of the State, Lisson Gallery, London 2013; Liverpool Biennial, 2012 and British Art Show 7. David Panos (with Anja Kirschner) is the winner of the 2011 Jarman award.
Born in 1971 in Athens (GR)
Lives and Works in London (UK)