The
artist approaches the history of 20th century sculpture through
carefully designed responses in wood, plaster, brick and concrete.
Part Company combines antithetical approaches to community living and
social participation by two distinct figures of Mexican Modernism,
Greek-Mexican activist Plotino Rhodakanaty (1828-1892) and Mexican
artist of German origin Mathias Goeritz (1915-1990). The
exhibition adapts models of public sculptures by Goeritz and is
informed by research on Rhodakanatys’ political concepts. It
explores a broader context around social class, politics of
sculpture, architecture and design, encompassing rather than
isolating these two separate ideologies.
"To
Part Company" means to end an association or relationship at the
same point in time, and suggests a persistent tendency to reconcile a
separation. Here, it functions as a need for conceptual reform
against disassociation and fragmented knowledge.
In
Part Company, Velonis re-evaluates Goeritz's principle of “Emotional
Architecture” formulated in 1954, which became the aesthetic basis
of his work. The german aesthete defends the importance of the
physical perception of space and the necessity for a sensual and
tactile experience with the object. For Goeritz, the archetypal hero
is the 'architect'. He believed the role of the artist is to reform
and artificialize the natural, emphasizing three-dimensional,
symbolical or inhabitable utopias.
Velonis
revisits Emotional Architecture through today's de mythologizing of
modern ideals by replacing Goeritz's metaphysics with earthly and
vulnerable constructions that draws inspiration from a variety of
discarded materials usually debris from the streets such as odd bits
of wood in the city suburbs or scattered edifices in abandoned
industrial and suburban areas. Similarly, Rhodakanaty's ideas on
working class emancipation, a worn-out term of 19th century ideals,
seems to be in need for an updated interpretation in the current
postwar market.
In
Part Company, Rhodakanaty's anonymous peasant acts as an invented
persona that replaces the eponymous citizen identified through
cultural supremacy whilst Goeritz's geometrical applications are
reversed to serve social experimentation rather than elitism. The
Greek Mexican anarchist may be urging us to re-think some of the
modernist formalistic trends also encountered in today's contemporary
art production. Understanding modernity's discourse through Goeritz's
approach is an intriguing way to justify the rejection of memory
(from collective to interpersonal relationships) and complements
Rhodakanaty's ethics through which Goeritz cannot be restricted
exclusively to the field of aesthetics, just as socialist narratives
may not be solely perceived through a passive reception of a
political message.
Part
Company
March
17 - April 28, 2016
Thursday
March 17, 7pm-10pm
