Anri Sala (Installation View), via Galerie Chantal Crousel
Artist Anri Sala opens a show of new work at Galerie Chantal Crousel this month, exhibiting a body of new frescoes that underscore continued reseaarch into the construction and composition of narrative, particularly oriented around refashioning and repurposing spaces and epochs.Â
The works, created using the al fresco technique, merge various geological and historical temporalities, utilizing ancient techniques that slowly accumulate layers as the work is constructed. Each composition is divided into giornata, corresponding to what can be accomplished in a day of work while the medium, called the intonaco, remains fresh. Once it is dry, the pigments are bound to the worked surface and changes are no longer possible. The artist’s every gesture affixes the material like a temporal imprint, fossilizing the color and creating a form of contemporary archeology. The artist also embeds pieces of marble into each surface, giving the impression of missing parts, wear and tear, and perhaps even violence, a constructed sense of space and time that implies dense narratives floating beyond the viewer’s awareness.
Anri Sala (Installation View), via Galerie Chantal Crousel
Anri Sala (Installation View), via Galerie Chantal Crousel
The result of these works are narratives disrupted, fragmented understandings of space and time that not only present a meticulous series of actions and operations, but equally withhold any other information. Sala fundamentally understands that the notion of a displaced history is as much about what floats just outside of the work’s visual orbit.
Anri Sala (Installation View), via Galerie Chantal Crousel
The show also features the series Surface to Air, derived from photographs taken by the artist of clouds seen from up in the air. These nearly abstract representations bear witness to a shifting, elusive reality. The undulating movement of the clouds harmonizes with the sharply delineated veins of the marble, a witness to a tangible and immutable temporal reality. With this series, Anri Sala juxtaposes elements of an ostensibly opposite nature, arranging them into a subtle visual continuity. The artist harnesses the suspense that arises from this unexpected encounter and opens up a latent, plural state of things.
The show closes October 7th.
– C. Rinhardt
Read more:
Anri Sala at Chantal Crousel [Exhibition Site]
