Interior Arrangements

About

Shin Gallery is pleased to present the conceptual sculptures of Josè Olano in Interior Arrangements, his debut exhibition in the United States. Olano’s work employs the typically mundane and inconsequential objects we encounter in our lives as his muse, such as furniture and fruit, and subverts their conventionality by rearranging them in highly precarious positions that circumvent our habitual perception of them.

The common denominator that persists throughout his work is an experimental exploration of the paradigm between a honed equilibrium and the imbued anticipation for change. In its most distilled form, balance evokes a sustained tranquility of equal distribution, a superior stasis that supersedes notions of excess or insufficiency. In reality though, this notion of balance is nearly always transient, easily tipped by factors of growth and change.

Olano strips the illusion of interminable stability by cultivating spaces that are on the precipice of becoming unbalanced, thereby instilling an intrinsic anticipation for change within the viewer. There is an expectation for the balance of the work to become undone, and ultimately, for something in a state of perfection to break composure. Olano conveys the palpable fragility of these forms in each moment. His use of fruit invokes further dimension to his work, encapsulating the progress of time in their slow degeneration and allowing the natural, rotting movement of the fruit to undermine the curated balance. There is fragility, but there is also mortality.

Olano’s works cultivate a space that invokes ephemeral ideas and casts them into a just barely tangible level of permanence. His art provokes the viewer to abandon the pre-determined constructs for the essential nature and balance of forms. In this sense, tables and mattresses preclude their prescribed definitions of everyday use and become objects worthy of visual awe and thoughtful meditation.