Pedro Reyes
Friday, 18 May 2012
Work from his exhibition at LABOR.
“WORK opens new headquarters and reopens its doors with a solo exhibition of Pedro Reyes (1972). Puzzle includes a series of studies in which the architecture of narrative structures combined with anthropological classification methodologies.
Among the pieces on display are Mutants , a polyptych consisting of 170 plates with images of ancient and modern mythologies. Like the periodic table, the origin of myths is organized by a shaft on which animals and objects are combined with human anthropomorphic characters (male and female) resulting in a rational structure for the products arising from irrational human imagination.
Hand-chairs is a new development within the combination of sculpture and design that Reyes explored in the past. Each pair consists of a left and a right hand with articulated fingers that allows the user to manipulate and gestures to explore non-verbal language settings.
The presence of design as narrative structure we find in the Museum Of Hypothetical Lifetimes , the model of a museum whose architectural plan includes galleries and corridors that correspond to different moments in the life of a person. In this activity the participant can choose from miniature objects with different meanings which placed in rooms ranging from birth to death. The school, work, relationships become themed rooms that will be illustrated by the objects selected and the participant will cure an exhibition, while prospective and retrospective of his own existence.
In a new series of sculptural portraits is the piece Pico della Mirandola , based on a passage from the Italian Renaissance philosopher who in “Prayer for the Dignity of Man” (1486) states the concept of man as “a being with no particular function, inconclusive, it should work on your self to become an angel or a demon. ” This volcanic stone sculpture is washed with a core drill in which you can insert other stone pieces representing eyes, nose, hair, mouths, etc.. The sculpture then becomes a kind of puzzle that constantly changes shape depending on the various interactions with the public.
Finally, in a shelf attached to one wall of the gallery are a series of paintings entitled “How to lose the fear of Painting”. Each of the twenty images presented have been subjected to various operations. Reyes has faced its own paint to treat these fabrics as “flat sculptures.” Literally, the statue has been lacking in one dimension only to recover the depth of the possible permutations of two-dimensional array. A similar analogy to the sentence which Luis Cardoza y Aragón used in contemporary painting in Mexico (1950) to describe art criticism: “The Venus de Milo holding the head of the Victory of Samothrace in his hands.” – LABOR