Weight for showing London
Curated by Paul Carey-Kent
At Maddox Arts, 52 Brook's Mews, London W1K 4ED
24 April – 13 June, 2015
Of the many competitors for our attention when we look at a work of art – meaning, narrative, form, colour, gesture, scale, sound, movement – its weight is not generally high in the list, heavy as much sculpture and some painting may be (Bram Bogart's super-thick applications or Analia Saban's container canvases come to mind). Indeed, although WEIGHT FOR THE SHOWING is themed around weight, all the works have other interesting agendas, most notably perhaps the frequency with which they skew logic and the zest with which they engage with art history
In 2011, Dutch artist Levi van Veluw built three versions of his boyhood bedroom, covered with thousands of symmetrical wooden shapes to symbolise his ‘urge for order and fear of losing control’. He has since developed that theme of the world on the edge of order or just tipping over it through charcoal drawings, installations, photography and film. Archive is part of his major project The Collapse of Cohesion. It shows cabinets laden with geometric forms crashing down in slow motion: not only might that stand in for the failure of aattemtps to impose order on the world, hence for emotional trauma, the molecular references could easily link it to the ‘Big Crunch’ which will be the ultimate end of times. And yet the fabulous aesthetic offsets that sufficiently to leave us in an ambiguous space.
