ART CITIES:Paris-Artur Lescher
Over thirty years, Artur Lescher presents a solid work as a sculptor, which results from a research around the articulation of materials, thoughts and forms. In this sense, the artist has on the particular, uninterrupted and precise dialogue with both architectonic space and design, and on his choice of materials, which can be metal, stone, wood, felt, salts, brass and copper, fundamental elements to highlight the power of this discourse.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Almine Rech Gallery Archive
In his solo exhibition “Asterismos” Artur Lescher continues his poetic investigations, proposing philosophical and scientific debates through his refined way of manipulating matter into forms and constructive procedures that dialogue with the architectural space. For his concept the artist says “Asterisms is the possibility of a new constellation, it is an exercise on assembling points and from them creating figures. Asterisms are non-official constellations, that is quite an important aspect because it gives each one of us the power to draw with our eyes our own personal constellations”. The neglect for scientific precision may initially confuse viewers of Artur Lescher’s otherwise perfectly crafted and balanced pieces: their eye is so powerfully guided in the perception of volumes, lines, their perfect integration into space, that it seems unimaginable that they are not the result of innumerable scholarly computations and precision engineering. On his choice of materials Lescher said, “I consider materials like characters in a play, they have there own voice. My part is to listen to their voices because the materials are necessary to write the “dialogues” of the piece. The concept of a work is built around the relationship of the materials”, he merely listens to their intrinsic energy and lays out a stage for them to express their vocations and potentialities when combined in a dialogue, not only with the space they are posed in, but also when they communicate between each other. Geometrical forms, when put in dialogue as an installation, create a fictional space of a sky. While, indeed, as spectators we pass through them in a terrestrial space like the ground floor of the gallery, their ancestral energy escape the confines of the room to fly until they reach the incommensurability of the sky. Since the 1980s, Artur Lescher has been creating poetic sculptures, objects, and installations through which he investigates the mechanics of form and movement, balance and tension, and architectural spaces. He came to national prominence in his native Brazil in 1987, when he participated in the 19th Bienal de São Paulo with “Aerólitos”, an installation of two Zeppelin-like balloons set side-by-side, one inside, the other outside of the pavilion’s windowed wall, creating a compelling double image that seemed to dematerialize the architectural feature separating them. Lescher has been playing with the perception of materials and spaces ever since, in works reflecting direct influences from Constructivism, Suprematism, the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement, Performance Art, and Minimalism. Artur Lescher has since become one of the most famous post-minimalist artists of his generation. This was further illustrated by works like “Infinito triple”, proof of Lescher’s unflinching inventiveness: his forms do not arise from a clearly-defined mathematical repertoire, but rather from his own perception of space and formidable sense of poetry. It restores the essential worth of perception and empiricism, which is to justify dimensions and scales by simply taking the viewer’s eye as a standard. A mobile, changing reality, like a pendulum oscillating under the influence of magnetic fluctuations, as real yet elusive as the movement of stars and gravitational interactions. Stripped of scientific objectivity, asterism becomes the power common to all human civilizations in time and space to mentally project and draw with the stars, to envision the position of humankind in the universe.
Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 64 Rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 12/1-23/2/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.alminerech.com
