Edgar Sarin. Hierarchisch angeordnete Edelgesteine, dreizehn.

About

Born 1989 in Marseille, Edgar Sarin lives and works between Paris and New York. Educated as an engineer, he is an artistic autodidact. Within his sometimes hardly perceivable oeuvre, he addresses the audience by creating situations and generating almost inaccessible spaces. He forms atmospheric environments, s!timulating dialogue, interpersonal relations and reflection.

Sarin’s exhibition has to be considered as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, to be experienced as a unity of senses, of time and space arranged as circling around one central piece, somehow like a novel. The eponymous work Hierarchisch angeordnete Edelgesteine, dreizehn consists of 13 wooden crates, buried since last October in a forest located in Berlin. The contents of the crates is secret. Edgar Sarin will excavate the crates and install them in the gallery as they are, still sealed, during the opening on March 3rd 2017. At the end of the exhibition, the crates will disappear again to be hidden in a secret place. As a substitute, the buyer of the work will receive a wooden sculpture, which is to be passed on to their descendants. After exactly 100 years, this sculptured wooden chalice is to be exchanged for the original boxes.

The central piece will be accompanied by sculptures and framed works on paper that mostly involve materials like gold, brass, wood, Paris stone, wax, concrete, sun-dried flowers, clay, air and water. These are pieces, so-called “relics“, incidentally collected by Sarin on his way to the Thirteen jewels hierarchically ordered. A “result of randomness and gravity“, as the artist has it. Like chapters of a novel, they relate subplots to the main storyline by indicating traces; revealing and hiding again. The recipient is inspired to investigate, filling in the missing information with their imagination and own assumptions.

The show begins as soon as Edgar Sarin enters the exhibition carrying the crates to be installed. He is presenting the pieces to the beholder's eye, creating and “‘shaping one’s mind-projection of an image in a special kind of atmosphere“ (Sarin), inviting the spectator to design a thought-projection towards the hidden part. Sarin is nothing but a sculptor. However, the material he creates is not exclusively physical, but also of intimate human speculation. “My work is very fragile as it starts existing as soon as the viewer gets involved in the process of conceiving the unreachable. It asks for the collaboration of the human being, as much as the survival of humanity relies on the implication of every single unit of it striving towards wisdom. All I am doing is creating images then shielding them from one’s eye for a certain amount of time. Therefore a latency comes between the possibility of an image and its obtainment. I believe the genuine work of art is here, during this latency.“ His works are duration pieces and results of an ongoing process which continues as long as the spectator risks a leap of faith.