Exhibition

Santiago Reyes Villaveces. Reside

20 Apr 2016

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Wednesday April 20 2016, at 6pm, Galerie MLF | Marie-Laure Fleisch presents Reside, a site-specific project by Santiago Reyes Villaveces to inaugurate the new Brussels exhibition space, an addition to the venue in Rome.

About

Besides its complex polysemy linked to its figurative use, the verb to reside (from the Latin residēre), also indicates the legal and administrative choice of a particular residence in a specific site; or more generally, it denotes the choice of a a fixed abode, or a place where one sojourns for a more or less stable period. This last meaning of the verb to reside best expresses the modus operandi used by Santiago Reyes Villaveces to create this exhibition; both his sojourn in the Belgian capital and the specificity of the exhibition space determine the conceptual and planning parameters of the work.
Reyes Villaveces's creative research is based on the Brazilian Neo-Concretism tradition and the Tropicália Movement, in specific the works of Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, and the Fragmentist poetics much loved by Jorge Luis Borges. From the former, he derives a sense of transitivity and precariousness of the work. From the latter, a concept of the fragment as a representation of an aesthetics of ruins interpreted in a non-romantic sense; a metaphor of something already born as a ruin, that has never really existed in its entirety.
Sculpture is Reyes Villaveces's preferred medium through which he explores its various possibilities by analysing different categories and physical structures of materials. His work tends towards a reciprocal system, in which the relation between materials, their form and collocation in space are destitute from any hierarchical organisation. Its plastic vocabulary creates a minimalist language, expressed through what the Colombian artist defines as an “immanent/silent architectural sensibility”, traced in the precarious structures that form the daily routine of the cities that he analyses: Bogotá first and foremost, and in this specific case, Brussels.
Besides, cities can be considered similar to a never-ending building site swarming with objects expressing the relentless tension between their residual and structural states. Indeed, the artist's attention focuses on these objects. For this reason, the primary materials used in this work are objets trouvées which have a transitory function in the work process. Residues or fragments of former constructions and a wide range of materials intelligently assembled, rendered un-functional and simultaneously raised to the level of art work, are used to study their expressive and formal possibilities, and their interaction with space and light.
Reyes Villaveces's work appears to stretch the physical limits of matter, thus challenging the concepts of scale, volume, weight, tension, gravity, surface, resistance, pressure, limits, perspective, and depth. His sculptures are represented as singular and visually forceful instruments originating from a short circuit between matter and surface, from mass and structure, expressed both as the synthesis of form and proportion that each single work takes on in respect to the rest. In this way, a few simple elements, sharply positioned in the exhibition space, question the sense of perception, and as such activate a relation of reciprocity between the architecture of the exhibition space, the viewer’s perception, and the temporal element of the viewing experience.

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Santiago Reyes Villaveces

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