D+T Project Gallery announces the opening of "Victory Over the Sun (Black Love, Two Bodies Racing in Space)" a new solo exhibition of Elena Bajo (b. 1976, Madrid).
From 2006 to 2009 Elena Bajo collected found paintings in flea markets in London, Madrid, Los Angeles and Berlin which she then sanded and overpainted. Her acts of transfiguring the material surface of the original object was part of an intricate silent performance enacted in her studio recalling the singular performances of Bruce Nauman's "Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance)", 1968. Here the intention is quite different and we must push forward from those seminal moments of 1968 to the early 20th century when the contingencies of art practice have moved from the investigation of Euclidian Geometries and original events to those of folded multiplicities in which reenactment and effacement of the past are favored.
The works presented here...are not about retracing a square, within the paradigm of structuralism and systems theory, but instead is a shamanistic conjuring of the first Black Square of Kazimir Severinovich Malevich. This beginning of Abstraction did not first appear as a painting but first rather as part of the set design of the first futurist opera Victory Over the Sun, 1913 in Saint Petersburg, Russia - thus the title of the show. It was two years later in 1915 that it appeared as the painting Black Square, at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. In her Cosmic Distress series represented in the gallery as eight paintings, each contains one black square the dimension of the original Malevich's work. The square is reconstituted and the forms are released from the crystalized condition of the found painting to become actual or other.
Quentin Meillassoux describes science fiction as fictions generated by knowledge conditioned by science in the present. Science fiction has the possibility of opening up scientific knowledge to unknown horizons, as it is based upon the presumption of science expanding beyond its knowledge, opening up possible futures retained within it (1). Building on Meillassoux's concept, Bajo's works produce, by analogy, 'artistic fictions': actions that through surface negation create negentropic relations from which new sensations and actions are made palpable. Another work entitled Dust Clocks, made from the powder or dust generated by the action of sanding the surface of the paintings is not shown in the gallery at this time.
Text by Warren Neidich, Venice CA, 2016
(1) Quentin Meillassoux, Metaphysics and Extro-Science Fiction, in Speculative Solution, ed. Robin Mackay, Falmouth: Editions Mego and Urbanomic, 2011, pp. 24-60
Entrada actualizada el el 20 ene de 2016
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