David Lamelas
18 May - 28 Jul 2007
DAVID LAMELAS
"Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire." - Jorge Luis Borges
David Lamelas left Buenos Aires, the city of his birth, in 1968, beginning his search for a temporary base from which to operate as an outside observer for the surface of the real, reality meaning "strict actuality", employing it as a point of departure. From London to Los Angeles, from there to New York and back to Europe - Brussels, Paris, Berlin - his nomadic practice has been never ending, today understood as a vital experiment in overcoming the human condition's greatest limitations - one's origins. Among the artists of his time, Lamelas may be considered one of the more elusive. Connected to significant trends in European Conceptualism, his work exudes the cultural conditions found within each of the cities he has resided while maintaining a peripheral position in relation to each period's commonplace. Beyond their intended "conceptual objectivity", the works in David Lamelas, currently on view at maccarone, function as documents of the consecutive lives the artist has lived as a foreigner: they reveal traces of the sidewalks, friends, galleries and tastes from this warehouse of identities.
This exhibition highlights the artist's focus on a practice of expanding, forgetting, and altering. If Lamelas' oeuvre functions as a travel journal of intense transformations in one body of work, it never loses its conceptual roots, occupying a trajectory of sculptures, installations, films, video-performances, photographs and drawings. Travel becomes the search for a richer and evolving artistic rehearsal that refuses to engage in any national project, aiming to eradicate the label of an Argentine artist in favor of "international artist."
Since the 1960s, Lamelas has dealt with time-specificity, positioning this notion in direct relationship with popular means of communication, mass media, and cinema, scrutinizing how communication systems present fact and fiction. Moving across continents, he has reassessed and revised many of his projects within these shifting contexts, such as the pieces that constitute his Time As Activity series. Time As Activity (Dusseldorf) (1969), the first of these and what the artist has called his earliest successful conceptual work, is a 16mm film divided in three four-minute sections each presenting the same information: a mute recording of activity occurring in three different places in the city, filmed using a fixed camera. We do not see an event, per se, but the rationality of time measured against the experience of the continuum of urban reality and monotonous flows, leaving the viewer with the task of creating his or her own mental construct.
The subsequent Time As Activity works showcased throughout the gallery refer to this seminal film and operate under the same conceptual parameters to survey Berlin, Warsaw, and later Los Angeles, and most recently New York. Series of photographs derived from the films hint at a cinematic narrative, dissecting fiction into examination, playing on the presence and absence of a subject. Each photo is branded with the exact time at which they were taken, caught within its own temporality. Lamelas captures the present as something topical, even if this topicality may translate as banal, alluding to the possibility of universality beyond time and place.
The artist's initial production from the 1960s was paintings and shaped canvases, later advancing into site-specific sculptural installations that confounded the autonomous work of art and the prevailing thoughts behind modern sculpture. Several examples from this period are shown throughout the gallery, such as El Super Elastico (The Super Elastic)(1965/2007), a critical early work recreated for this exhibition. The work highlights Lamelas' transition from Pop-influenced painting to a kind of sculpture issuing from the wall - the culmination of the long process of figurative disintegration. A rugby player's uniform has been broken down from pop fable to a minimalist vocabulary; modulations and division of forms make the work part of a contingent spatial situation defined by the elements of the space's context. The frame-like table construction spawns organic shapes that spread out in the back of the room and balloon out into cloud-like formations. The vaguely metaphorical use of color echoes rudiments of hard-edge painting and the shaped canvas, reducing forms to a kind of primary school geometry conceived as if on a "pre-acid" acid trip.
Piel Rosa aka Skin Surface (1965) suggests the clash between the artificially pink skin and manufactured form. Estudio de relaciones entre un prisma triangular y El Empire State Building (Study of the relationships between a triangular prism and The Empire State Building)(1965) signals a further interest in industrialized methods of production by using the greatly championed built-in kitchen material of that time, FORMICA. Cuatro placas de aluminio (Four aluminum plaques)(1966) proposes a disarticulated, impermanent sculptural situation, a precariously balanced cross that invites reflection upon the space where it is exhibited. A standard sheet of aluminum is cut into four strips, one rests against the gallery wall with its lower part curved from its own weight, pointing out a specific spatial situation the viewer can only observe in association with the gallery's architecture.
Maccarone is proud to present the first solo exhibition of the artist in New York after almost twenty years. David Lamelas represented Argentina in the 1967 Sao Paolo Biennial and the 1968 Venice Biennial. His work was recently included in the retrospective exhibition, Los Angeles-Paris 1955-1985 at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre G. Pompidou in Paris. Other group exhibitions include Reconsidering the Object of Art, 1965-1975, MOCA, Los Angeles, 1995; The Last Picture Show, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2003. Solo exhibitions include A Refutation of Time, Witte de With, Rotterdam, 1997; Dentro y Fuera de la Pantella, MALBA, Buenos Aires, 2002; and Foreigner, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, 2005. David Lamelas currently lives and works between Europe, Buenos Aires and Los Angeles.
"Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire." - Jorge Luis Borges
David Lamelas left Buenos Aires, the city of his birth, in 1968, beginning his search for a temporary base from which to operate as an outside observer for the surface of the real, reality meaning "strict actuality", employing it as a point of departure. From London to Los Angeles, from there to New York and back to Europe - Brussels, Paris, Berlin - his nomadic practice has been never ending, today understood as a vital experiment in overcoming the human condition's greatest limitations - one's origins. Among the artists of his time, Lamelas may be considered one of the more elusive. Connected to significant trends in European Conceptualism, his work exudes the cultural conditions found within each of the cities he has resided while maintaining a peripheral position in relation to each period's commonplace. Beyond their intended "conceptual objectivity", the works in David Lamelas, currently on view at maccarone, function as documents of the consecutive lives the artist has lived as a foreigner: they reveal traces of the sidewalks, friends, galleries and tastes from this warehouse of identities.
This exhibition highlights the artist's focus on a practice of expanding, forgetting, and altering. If Lamelas' oeuvre functions as a travel journal of intense transformations in one body of work, it never loses its conceptual roots, occupying a trajectory of sculptures, installations, films, video-performances, photographs and drawings. Travel becomes the search for a richer and evolving artistic rehearsal that refuses to engage in any national project, aiming to eradicate the label of an Argentine artist in favor of "international artist."
Since the 1960s, Lamelas has dealt with time-specificity, positioning this notion in direct relationship with popular means of communication, mass media, and cinema, scrutinizing how communication systems present fact and fiction. Moving across continents, he has reassessed and revised many of his projects within these shifting contexts, such as the pieces that constitute his Time As Activity series. Time As Activity (Dusseldorf) (1969), the first of these and what the artist has called his earliest successful conceptual work, is a 16mm film divided in three four-minute sections each presenting the same information: a mute recording of activity occurring in three different places in the city, filmed using a fixed camera. We do not see an event, per se, but the rationality of time measured against the experience of the continuum of urban reality and monotonous flows, leaving the viewer with the task of creating his or her own mental construct.
The subsequent Time As Activity works showcased throughout the gallery refer to this seminal film and operate under the same conceptual parameters to survey Berlin, Warsaw, and later Los Angeles, and most recently New York. Series of photographs derived from the films hint at a cinematic narrative, dissecting fiction into examination, playing on the presence and absence of a subject. Each photo is branded with the exact time at which they were taken, caught within its own temporality. Lamelas captures the present as something topical, even if this topicality may translate as banal, alluding to the possibility of universality beyond time and place.
The artist's initial production from the 1960s was paintings and shaped canvases, later advancing into site-specific sculptural installations that confounded the autonomous work of art and the prevailing thoughts behind modern sculpture. Several examples from this period are shown throughout the gallery, such as El Super Elastico (The Super Elastic)(1965/2007), a critical early work recreated for this exhibition. The work highlights Lamelas' transition from Pop-influenced painting to a kind of sculpture issuing from the wall - the culmination of the long process of figurative disintegration. A rugby player's uniform has been broken down from pop fable to a minimalist vocabulary; modulations and division of forms make the work part of a contingent spatial situation defined by the elements of the space's context. The frame-like table construction spawns organic shapes that spread out in the back of the room and balloon out into cloud-like formations. The vaguely metaphorical use of color echoes rudiments of hard-edge painting and the shaped canvas, reducing forms to a kind of primary school geometry conceived as if on a "pre-acid" acid trip.
Piel Rosa aka Skin Surface (1965) suggests the clash between the artificially pink skin and manufactured form. Estudio de relaciones entre un prisma triangular y El Empire State Building (Study of the relationships between a triangular prism and The Empire State Building)(1965) signals a further interest in industrialized methods of production by using the greatly championed built-in kitchen material of that time, FORMICA. Cuatro placas de aluminio (Four aluminum plaques)(1966) proposes a disarticulated, impermanent sculptural situation, a precariously balanced cross that invites reflection upon the space where it is exhibited. A standard sheet of aluminum is cut into four strips, one rests against the gallery wall with its lower part curved from its own weight, pointing out a specific spatial situation the viewer can only observe in association with the gallery's architecture.
Maccarone is proud to present the first solo exhibition of the artist in New York after almost twenty years. David Lamelas represented Argentina in the 1967 Sao Paolo Biennial and the 1968 Venice Biennial. His work was recently included in the retrospective exhibition, Los Angeles-Paris 1955-1985 at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre G. Pompidou in Paris. Other group exhibitions include Reconsidering the Object of Art, 1965-1975, MOCA, Los Angeles, 1995; The Last Picture Show, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2003. Solo exhibitions include A Refutation of Time, Witte de With, Rotterdam, 1997; Dentro y Fuera de la Pantella, MALBA, Buenos Aires, 2002; and Foreigner, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, 2005. David Lamelas currently lives and works between Europe, Buenos Aires and Los Angeles.