Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain
Charbel-joseph H. Boutros
Daniel Gustav Cramer
Ignasi Aballí
Karin Sander
Nicolás Lamas
Rémy Zaugg
Much Ado About Nothing
Curated by Vasa J. Perović
Doing a show, in a gallery space, as a collector, is a challenge: unlike a curator, who often proposes a speculative subject or statement and goes on to develop it regardless of their personal choices, a collector is hopelessly bound, or limited, by his own (permanent or current) obsessions. This is an unfortunate, but simultaneously liberating and defining limitation in this particular instance as well.
Much Ado About Nothing, a title borrowed from a light Shakespearian comedy, brings together two of my personal obsessions – one is my infatuation with work that is pervaded with humour, a companion to art we’re very often drawn to, and the other is the notion of ‘nothing’ (or almost nothing, to use a Miesian term often employed in my profession of an architect), not so much in a philosophical or nihilistic sense, but rather as productive restraint, characteristic of the work of some of the artists I’ve proposed for this show.
Exhibition view: Much Ado About Nothing, Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Ignasi Aballí, Karin Sander, Nicolás Lamas, Rémy Zaugg, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2023
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In a sense, for a long time, but most definitely and decisively since the Duchampian moments of the 20th century, the field of art has radically expanded, shifting from physical craft to an intellectual speculation, allowing for drastic (yet sometimes scandalously enriching) subtractions in the formal means of expression, challenging what is art, who is the artist and what constitutes a work of art itself.
Much Ado About Nothing, is therefore a kind of (hopefully) humorous yet serious look at different practices that deal with almost nothing – be it a no material, no ‘artistic’ process in a generally used sense of the word.
As a ’starting’ point, a work that comes from my own accumulation (as collection seems to me to be a far too purposeful a word) by Rémy Zaugg is at first sight the absolute opposite of a humorous promise. However, in its resolute seriousness, Fuer Ein Bild (For a Painting) no.12, from 1986/87 is a work that ‘defines’ the show – a primed canvas, stretched onto a frame with the help of nails, awaiting a painting. A painterly, expressive layering of white primer suggests an act of ‘painting’, a production of a painting, an object, albeit one devoid of contents expected.
Karin Sander, Mailed Painting 137. Bonn-Berlin-Madrid-Berlin-Hong Kong-Berlin-San Gimignano-Berlin-Palma de Mallorca-Berlin-Lisboa, 2013. Stretched canvas in standard sizes, white universal primer. Ø120 cm
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The mailed paintings of Karin Sander, a series on which she has been working on for some time now, are also just primed, ready made canvases bearing traces of their travels from one exhibition to another, as is visible from their titles, which track this geographical and productive progression; the accidental traces left by postal services and accumulated dirt becoming part of the pictorial expression of the work.
Karin Sander, Mailed Painting 213. Berlin-El Sharkia-Leitchfield-Thu Dau Mot-Paris-Berlin-Taipei-Lisboa, 2015. Stretched canvas in standard sizes, white universal primer. 60 x 80 x 3 cm
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Karin Sander, Mailed Painting 154. Los Angeles-Berlin-Wien-Basel-Wien-Berlin-Munchen-Berlin-Solothum-Berlin-Lisboa, 2014. Stretched canvas in standard sizes, white universal primer. 50 x 71 cm
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Karin Sander, Mailed Painting 91. Sydney – Pittenweem-Munchen-Berlin-Emsdetten-Berlin-Lisboa, 2008. Stretched canvas in standard sizes, white universal primer. 25 x 20 cm
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Karin Sander, Mailed Painting 23A. New York-Reykjavik-Berlin-Munchen-Siegen-Berlin-Koln-Munchen-Berlin-Solothurn-Paris-Lisboa, 2006. Stretched canvas in standard sizes, white universal primer. 25 x 25 cm
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Karin Sander, Mailed Painting 170. Berlin-Zurich-Berlin-Winterthur-Berlin-Solothum-Paris-Berlin-Taipei-Lisboa, 2015
Stretched canvas in standard sizes, white universal primer. 60 x 50 cm
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Exhibition view: Much Ado About Nothing, Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Ignasi Aballí, Karin Sander, Nicolás Lamas, Rémy Zaugg, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2023
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Nicolás Lamas‘ works are ‘portraits’ – portraits of people around him, ‘registered’ through the enlarged photographs of their iPad screens, with the dirt and fingerprints overexposed; as well as ‘portraits’ of unknown subjects of car collisions, instantly and invisibly embedded into exploded airbags, stretched and transformed into canvases.
Nicolás Lamas, Rossana. Blind Gestures, 2014. Inkjet Print on Glossy Paper. 150 x 113 cm
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Nicolás Lamas, Olivier 2. Blind Gestures, 2014. Inkjet Print on Glossy Paper. 150 x 113 cm
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Nicolás Lamas, Impact Zone, 2023 (general view). Used airbag
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Exhibition view: Much Ado About Nothing, Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Ignasi Aballí, Karin Sander, Nicolás Lamas, Rémy Zaugg, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2023
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Ignasi Aballí, Skin, 2020.
Transparent acrylic gel, wood. 24 x 24 cm
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Ignasi Aballí presents a series of rejected’ paintings, artist’s failed attempts from previous decades to paint (or ‘paint’) his non-paintings, works that continously defy and explore the notion of painting and artwork. Thus, failures of an artist to not-paint become the work in their own right, stripped (de-crucified, if you want) from the supporting frames, at times still bearing the leftovers of the studio process.
Ignasi Aballí, Abandoned Painting I, 2004-2023. Dust on canvas. 22 x 28 cm
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Ignasi Aballí, Abandoned Painting II, 1997-2023. Dust on canvas.16 x 22 cm
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Exhibition view: Much Ado About Nothing, Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Ignasi Aballí, Karin Sander, Nicolás Lamas, Rémy Zaugg, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2023
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Ignasi Aballí, Rejected Painting I, 2007-2023. Acrylic, scotch tape and dust on canvas. 112 x 112 cm
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Ignasi Aballí, Rejected Painting II, 2007-2023. Acrylic, scotch tape and dust on canvas. 112 x 112 cm
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Ignasi Aballí, Rejected Painting III, 2007-2023. Acrylic, scotch tape and dust on canvas. 112 x 112 cm
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Daniel Gustav Cramer also touches upon a notion of portrait in creating a library piece documenting a compulsive personal collection: an archive of sands from around the globe, accumulated through exchanges and arranged by continents. The enlarged photographs of the maps of the oceans and seas, done in 17th century Italy, not containing any actual points of reference – islands or rocks, but only a gridded coordinate system framing the ’empty’ space of the seas.
Daniel Gustav Cramer, Untitled (Mare) III, 2017. C-print framed.
151 × 106 cm
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Daniel Gustav Cramer, Sand, 2021. Shelf, table, 14 books. 103 x 91 x 32.5 cm
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Daniel Gustav Cramer, Sand, 2021 (detail). Shelf, table, 14 books. 103 x 91 x 32.5 cm
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The work of Detanico Lain, an artist duo working with the notions of language and typography, presents a series of gypsum plates – the ‘original’ material of sculptoral work – framing an empty square in the gallery (a ‘sculpture’) and spelling nada, nothing, alongside a typographical work bringing the two opposites (tudo/nada, everything/nothing) together.
Exhibition view: Much Ado About Nothing, Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Ignasi Aballí, Karin Sander, Nicolás Lamas, Rémy Zaugg, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2023
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Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain,
Palavras Compostas (Tudo/Nada), 2012-2023. Matt-black cut-out adhesive-backed vinyl. Variable dimensions
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Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, nada (pilha), 2023. 20 plates of white gypsum. 20 x (40 x 40 x 5 cm) / Inst. 200 x 200 x 71 cm
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Exhibition view: Much Ado About Nothing, Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Ignasi Aballí, Karin Sander, Nicolás Lamas, Rémy Zaugg, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2023
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Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, Dream Salt, 2014. Equal parts salt and sugar. Variable dimensions
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Exhibition view: Much Ado About Nothing, Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Ignasi Aballí, Karin Sander, Nicolás Lamas, Rémy Zaugg, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2023
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Last but certainly not least, Charbel-joseph H. Boutros‘ work Dream Salt, an equal measure of salt and sugar, ground and mixed together, ‘apparent opposites’, united and inseparable in their common whiteness and piled against the wall, finishes this short tour, acting as a dusty coda to this small exploration of almost nothing, that does a lot.
— Vasa J. Perović
Exhibition view: Much Ado About Nothing, Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Ignasi Aballí, Karin Sander, Nicolás Lamas, Rémy Zaugg, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2023
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ANGELA DETANICO / RAFAEL LAIN
Angela Detanico (1974) and Rafael Lain (1973) are Brazilian artists living and working in Paris. They draw systems of representation and writing of time, space, memory and the infinite from scientific, mathematical and literary research. Linguist/semiologist and graphic designer respectively, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain question the use of graphic signs in society. They are particularly interested in the notion and notation of the time and the forms, which it can take and thus create new writing systems by substituting traditional letters of the alphabet with forms from daily life. These forms are then staged in the exhibition space giving this writing an unprecedented materiality. Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain continue to question the role of language and its symbolic and physical place in our society. The language therefore reveals its dual function, a tool of communication but also instrument of reading and questioning of different cultures. Oscillating between rudimentary and advanced technology, their pieces take on forms as diverse as text, image, animation, sound and installation. Whether they are alphabets, cartographies or calendars, they address the very foundations of these codes governing our daily lives, convinced of the crossing between sign and meaning.
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CHARBEL-JOSEPH H. BOUTROS
Charbel-joseph H. Boutros was born in Lebanon in 1981 and lives and works between Beirut and Paris. In his work invisibility is charged with intimate, geographical and historical layers; finding poetic lines that extend beyond the realm of existing speculations and realities. Being born in the middle of the Lebanese war, his art is not engaged in an explicit political and historical reflection, but is more accurately haunted by the said political and historical reflection. For H. Boutros, each exhibition is a new geography that reformulates reality.
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DANIEL GUSTAV CRAMER
Daniel Gustav Cramer lives and works in Berlin. Cramer’s works are the amalgam of an ongoing research, like a traveler’s journal that describe the human conditions they draw its images from a collective experience and our commonly shared memories. Our urge to explore, to collect and to archive, to eventually connect our journey to a relevant memory is something Cramer is trying to capture through a variety of formal and linguistic strategies, through live experiences and the appropriation of existing memories.
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IGNASI ABALLÍ
Ignasi Aballí (Barcelona, 1958). Lives and works in Barcelona. Aballí traces the elusive marks left by the passage of time in works that use an eclectic range of unconventional materials such as dust, sunlight, corrosion, newspaper clippings, shredded banknotes or typewriter correction fluid. The delicate visual poetry that emerges is instilled with a haunting yet unsentimental sense of transience and ephemerality. Aballí’s work includes language-based pieces, conceptually-oriented sculptures, paintings, installations, photographs, found-objects and videos. While rooted in the practices of Duchampian-oriented conceptual art, it does not eschew the power of the object, but rather stands out for its subtle handling of color and material. Over the course of his career, Aballí’s work has been characterized by continual shifts and renewals of style, format and material. However, certain ongoing concerns are found throughout his oeuvre, such as absence and time-generated obsolescence, as well as numerous corollary variants, such as disappearance, transparency, invisibility and illegibility. By incorporating emptiness as an active agent, Aballí’s work seeks to suggest rather than to declare, providing further evidence that something other than absence lies beyond the absence of evidence.
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KARIN SANDER
Karin Sander (Bensberg, 1957). Lives and works in Berlin. Karin Sander works with situations, their social and historical contexts, involving interventions in existing structures and institutions. The medium the work is realized in is painting, sculpture, electronic media, science, architecture; in brief: each medium is available for working out its specific potential.
The intersection of work, recipient and institution, of what is found and what is added, of presence and absence, is emphasized and exhibited. Her Mailed Paintings (begun in 2004), for example, standard-sized and primed canvases of various shapes, are sent to exhibitions without any kind of protection; while being on display constantly, they collect and display traces and marks of their journey.
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NICOLÁS LAMAS
Nicolás Lamas (Lima 1980). Lives and works in Brussels. The practice of Nicolás Lamas is fed by a reflection on space, time, culture and science. Lamas formalises his interrogations through diverse media, whereby he questions the codes of ‘showing’ and confronts objects that seem opposite at first as to let new meaning and questions emerge. Through his eyes, matter often presents itself as a complex archaeological site characterized by a range of inanimate materials, life forms, technological artefacts, times in collapse and linguistic references. These structures combine fiction, life and inertness while triggering a space of transaction between the human linguistic way of apprehension and other forms of activating perception. Both the human and non-human negotiate a dynamic entanglement with each other. Similarly, Lamas’ oeuvre defies stability. Yet, there are recurrent approaches in his practice such as an interest for industrial products, the traces of humanity on nature or the body/technology entanglement; he also puts forward an aesthetic relationship between his work and rituals that invoke ephemeral images created by impulsive composition and interdependent making. (Excerpt of the text “Matter exists differently here” by Alejandro Alonso Diaz).
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RÉMY ZAUGG
Rémy Zaugg was born in 1943, in Courgenay, Switzerland. He lived and worked in Pfastatt, France and Basel, Switzerland, until his death in 2005. Zaugg worked with the meaning of text and words as subjects in his paintings, in which our seeing and our perception are recurring themes. His works used language in a fragmented way to convey that which is most critical for a human, being seen by the Other. Zaugg was of the opinion that seeing and consciousness are closely linked and that our understanding of the world is shaped through the overlaps between them. Throughout his practice there was a desire to make the viewer aware of the perceptive tools that each person possesses. He put great emphasis on the space that emerges between the work of art, the receiver and the context. Zaugg also took a strong interest in language and its power to deconstruct and reconstruct new contexts. Early on in his practice he found a position between painting and text (between what we see and what we read)—and it was in this liminal space that he worked with his comprehensive series. Zaugg was active in a number of different mediums, among others painting, text, sculpture and architectural models.
(PT)
Much Ado About Nothing
Fazer uma exposição numa galeria, como coleccionador, é um desafio: ao contrário de um(a) curador(a), que muitas vezes propõe um tema ou uma afirmação especulativa e se propõe desenvolvê-la independentemente das suas escolhas pessoais, um coleccionador está irremediavelmente preso, ou limitado, pelas suas próprias obsessões (permanentes ou actuais). Trata-se de uma limitação infeliz, mas simultaneamente libertadora e definidora, também neste caso particular.
Much Ado About Nothing, título emprestado de uma comédia shakespeariana ligeira, reúne duas das minhas obsessões pessoais – uma é a minha paixão por obras impregnadas de humor, um companheiro da arte que nos atrai frequentemente, e a outra é a noção de “nada” (ou quase nada, para usar um termo miesiano frequentemente utilizado na minha profissão de arquitecto), não tanto num sentido filosófico ou niilista, mas antes como contenção productiva, caraterística do trabalho de alguns dos artistas que propus para esta exposição.
De certo modo desde há muito tempo, mas definitivamente e decisivamente desde os momentos duchampianos do século XX, o campo da arte expandiu-se radicalmente, passando de um ofício físico a uma especulação intelectual e acolhendo subtracções drásticas (mas por vezes escandalosamente enriquecedoras) aos meios de expressão formais e pondo em causa o que é a arte, quem é o artista e o que constitui a própria obra de arte.
Much Ado About Nothing é, portanto, uma espécie de (espero) olhar humorístico e ao mesmo tempo sério sobre diferentes práticas que lidam com quase nada – seja um processo sem material, sem “arte” no sentido geralmente utilizado da palavra.
Como ponto de partida, uma obra que vem da minha própria acumulação (dado que colecção me parece ser uma palavra demasiado propositada), de Rémy Zaugg é, à primeira vista, o oposto de uma promessa humorística. No entanto, na sua absoluta seriedade, Für Ein Bild (Para uma pintura) n.º 12, de 1986/87, é uma obra que “define” a exposição – uma tela preparada, esticada numa moldura com a ajuda de pregos, à espera de uma pintura. Uma camada expressiva e pictórica de primário branco sugere um ato de “pintura”, a produção de um quadro, um objeto, ainda que desprovido do conteúdo esperado.
As pinturas por correio de Karin Sander, uma série que tem vindo a trabalhar há já algum tempo, são também apenas telas preparadas, com vestígios das suas viagens de uma exposição para outra, visíveis nos seus títulos que seguem esta progressão geográfica e produtiva; os vestígios acidentais deixados pelos serviços postais e a sujidade acumulada tornam-se parte da expressão pictórica da obra.
Ignasi Aballí apresenta uma série de pinturas “rejeitadas”, tentativas falhadas do artista em décadas anteriores para pintar (ou “pintar”) as suas não-pinturas, obras que desafiam e exploram continuamente a noção de pintura e de obra de arte. Assim, os fracassos de um artista para não pintar tornam-se a obra por si só, despojada (descrucificada, se quisermos) das molduras que a suportam, por vezes ainda com os restos do processo de estúdio.
As obras de Nicolás Lamas são “retratos” – retratos de pessoas que o rodeiam, “registados” através de fotografias ampliadas dos ecrãs dos seus iPads, com a sujidade e as impressões digitais sobre-expostas; bem como “retratos” de sujeitos desconhecidos envolvidos em colisões de automóveis, instantânea e invisivelmente incorporados em airbags explodidos, esticados e transformados em telas.
Daniel Gustav Cramer também aborda a noção de retrato ao criar uma peça de biblioteca que documenta uma colecção pessoal obsessiva: um arquivo de areias de todo o mundo, acumuladas através de trocas ao longo dos tempos e organizadas por continentes. Do mesmo modo, as fotografias ampliadas dos mapas dos oceanos e mares feitos em Itália no século XVII não contêm quaisquer pontos de referência reais – ilhas ou rochas -, mas apenas um sistema de coordenadas em grelha que enquadra o espaço “vazio” dos mares.
Detanico Lain, dupla de artistas que trabalha as noções de linguagem e tipografia, apresenta um conjunto de placas de gesso – o material “original” do trabalho escultórico – que forma um quadrado vazio na galeria (uma “escultura”) que soletra nada, juntamente com um trabalho tipográfico que junta os dois opostos (tudo/nada).
Por último, mas não menos importante, a obra Dream Salt de Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, medidas iguais de sal e açúcar, moídos e misturados, “opostos aparentes”, unidos e inseparáveis na sua brancura comum e empilhados contra a parede, termina este pequeno percurso, actuando como uma coda poeirenta desta pequena exploração de quase nada, que faz muito.
— Vasa J. Perović
