Hollybush Gardens

David Panos

12 Sep - 12 Oct 2014

Installation view
DAVID PANOS
The Dark Pool
12 September - 11 October 2014

‘.something kind of sad but not sad if you know what I mean.’ DJ Rashad

Writer and poet Keston Sutherland has written about Marx’s use of the term, Gallerte (gelatin) in relation to the concept of the ‘abstract human labour’. Although Marx is describing an abstract category, a conceptualization of the labour frozen within commodities, his use of this poetic jargon hints at a disgusting process of physical decomposition and reconstitution into condiment.

David Panos’ new body of work positions itself in this intersection between fleshy physicality, fetishism and metaphysics. It continues the formal and thematic engagement with the notion of ‘real abstraction’ and the theatrics of the commodity form begun in recent collaborative works like Ultimate Substance (2012).

For The Dark Pool Panos collaborated with the occupied Teatro Valle in Rome on a series of filmed improvisations working with the mechanisms of the theatre and in an impromptu green screen studio. The Valle’s performers and technicians worked with a number of randomly selected objects from the occupation (Ikea tables, camping mats, empty crates) to produce a fractured ballet of quotidian gestures that form the core of the work.

This footage was subsequently manipulated into densely layered videos and sculptural arrangements where bodies and things interpenetrate or decompose into a digital haze and fragments of frozen movement are embedded in mass-produced surfaces. Green screens are used as an analogue of the universal exchangeablity of all commodities – a signifier of limitless exchange where any object/image can be fused with another through digital compositing. By misusing the software designed to seamlessly substitute green with another image Panos has created a strangely visceral yet spectral vision of objects and bodies consumed by a ghostly green goo, an abstracting abstract substance.

Recent solo shows include: Liste, Basel 2014, Artists’ Film Club, ICA, London, 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: 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.
 

Tags: Gelatin, Anja Kirschner, David Panos