Date: 2020
Author: Tom Saunders
Matérias Incertas (Uncertain Matter) brings together three international, interdisciplinary artists whose works explore in different ways the tangibility of material in the digital age. Featuring video, sculpture, glass, print, and installation, their works filter a concern with formal aesthetics and abstraction through an expanded material palette. Whilst each artist makes works that are strongly visual, their processes of production are highly mediated and complex. They reflect both an awareness of how the experience of digital worlds has altered our relationship with matter, and a desire to innovate relative to modernist art history.
As such, a mood of detachment and distance prevails: the hand of the artist is not entirely missing, but it is being controlled by a mind that has become analytical. Over the past three decades, computers have become more central in daily life, to the extent that they are now increasingly becoming extensions of our bodies. The outcomes of science shape every aspect of human life, yet its processes are now so advanced and specialised that it is virtually impossible for the average human to understand how their world is constructed.
In attempting to respond to this state of affairs, many contemporary artists have engaged in quasi-reactionary, performative obsessions with material for its own sake. Many others have fully embraced technology, thereby losing their connection to matter and getting lost in the groundless and infinite space of the digital. The artists in this exhibition attempt to find a path through this situation without falling into either of these traps. Working broadly within a tradition of abstraction (without excluding the representational possibilities of cameras), their works aim to construct new spaces that are both material and virtual. Existing in the ambiguous borderland between flatness and pictorial depth, these works invite the viewer to explore the material possibilities of art in the age of the silicon microchip.
Martim Brion presents an extensive series of his engagements with photography and matter, including a new series that creates alien textures and spaces from the organic, cosmic metaphor of the egg. Brion’s works are situated at the intersection of ‘neutral space’ between painting, photography, and sculpture. The viewer is kept at a distance by their flawless surfaces: the precise, gesture-free painting of minimalist cubes or acrylic plastic, which protects digital prints from organic decay. Brion’s objects and the photographs are in a dialogue, frequently informed by the language of architecture. Conceived in relation to his sculptural body of work, Brion’s photography records situations that are both staged and encountered. Acting as a dictionary of formal possibilities, his works hover on the border of representation, conjuring a sense of elusive deja vu.
Tom Saunders shows a selection of works from his ongoing series ‘Art in the Graveyard’, as well as a new video work. ‘Art in the Graveyard’ combines a multiplicity of digital imagery, stitching together compositions that invite and resist interpretation with equal measure. Hinting at narratives and constructed spaces, they are centered around the pathos of archival imagery and the theatrical, utopian space of the art gallery. ‘Early Signs of the New Normal’ is an infinitely looping video, which offers a form of time-based collage that complements the two-dimensional universe of ‘Art in the Graveyard’. Fragmented, abstracted, distorted videos and images taken from YouTube as well as the artist’s own archive, construct a jagged viewing experience that resonates with the ubiquitous, numbing effect of information overload and saturation. Presented in a cage, the work attests to a pessimistic perspective on the possibility of communication in the Internet age.
Silke Weißbach presents the installation, ‘And you had all to lose sight of me’, a floor work made of three blown glass vessels on rectangular mirror plates together with a viscous liquid consisting primarily of a solution of sugar, beetroot, and glow-in-the-dark pigments alongside two ultramarine C-prints and a morphing digital video loop. Weißbach’s work explores and processes raw materials from the food, pharmaceutical, and cosmetics industries, such as glucose and wax, alongside conventional art materials such as pigments, plaster, and time-based media to create impermanent and fragile material states. Leaking fluids, disintegrating textures, and fragmented objects redefine the concept of deconstruction through structural transformation. Together with digital events, such as looping images and sound compositions, the materials assemble into amorphous and hybrid landscapes, expanding in space and time.
Martim Brion 