ART-PRESENTATION: Magali Reus-Private Road

Magali Reus’s sculptures often resemble the furniture and equipment of modern domestic interiors and public spaces, most frequently functional objects such as fridges, seating, pots and pans. Interested in the graphic language of the objects that surround us, Reus identifies and makes use of formal qualities that carry specific associations, or invite what she calls “A kind of meandering emotional projection”.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Eva Presenhuber Gallery Archive

Magali Reus presents her solo exhibition “Private Road” at Eva Presenhuber Gallery in New York. The new series “Settings” takes the NO PARKING road sign as its starting point. Immediate graphic communication is the architectural essence of road signs: their message is a first and primary function – go this way, stop here, beware: dog. Yet nested into the public sphere over time they accrue fragments of information, contradictory patterns, or surface interventions that open them up to material collage. Like cultural artifacts they are a quiet canvas for a more unhinged type of mark making: the obscure shadow-play of nightlife, globs of bird shit or chewing gum, busted headlamp residue, lost dog pleas, advertising, and pornography. Hung at mirror height, the “Settings” works read as a type of portraiture: polyvocal eyes, heads, or faces, they are watching us as we watch them. Objects from the genre of domestic melodrama (toothpaste, mouse trap, windscreen wiper) are enshrined behind Perspex in small recessed cavities. Like place markers at a table, these utensils are now complicit performers in the watching. Provocatively perfect replicas of their real-life selves, each implies an action – a foaming, a snapping, a killing, an isolating. They amplify the pun of their very existence as signs: take one layer away and beneath it lies yet more language and symbolist instruction. In the “Empty Every Night” series, a strange dismantling of time occurs. As devotees of the 24/7 mentality of connectedness, we’re no longer tied to the binary relationships of light and dark: the Western collision of cyclical concerns (eating, shitting, sleeping, fucking) with the unbroken interface of transaction has created a fracture between solid and immaterial. Like “Settings” these new works are dioramas of sorts whose snapshot times could mark a point in any number of days. Set inside resin-cast bucket or lamp-shade type forms, numbers of a specific time: 12:59; 06:02; 08:05, etc. are written out in flexed and twisted steel rod mimicking calligraphic form. Their knots and loops are pushed to a point of material discomfort suggestive of the tangles of our own muscle memory, our own brain synapses not quite pulled out of sleep. Like burnt-out neon tubing, these numbers seem yet another cosmic conceit. Perhaps time is a dumb fluidity that needs to be caught like water before it soaks away. Perhaps the bucket is a shade, a roof, or amplifying speaker. Like alarm clocks mocking their own obsessiveness in eking seconds from the day, these works are anxious in their stance, their metrics of volume and audibility perversely tangled. A new work, “Visitor (39 Gt Jns St)”, carved from solid Hemlock wood sits poised in the doorway. Formally mimicking the proportions of a door wedge, it seems both directional and obdurate. The wedge is not utilitarian but rather carved to replicate the moldings and furniture of the doorway it purports to service: the building number, scaffold supports, chain, and padlock are all worked into the wood surface via carefully chiseled gestures. Like all the works in the exhibition “Visitor (39 Gt Jns St)”, is locked in semantic confusion – is it a generous prop to assist or a more silent blockade to breach and limit? Two final works from a recent series, “Dearest”, take the construction of a ladder as a starting point to explore the idea of the romantic serenade. Objects of surreal figuration, they contain metalwork profiles machined like calligraphic alphabets: the letter ‘D’ for ‘dearest’ as well as the enlarged form of a cast resin hat in place of the protagonist. Approximate in proportion to a standing or lying figure, the frameworks are aspirational forms, suggesting physical conveyance from one point to another. Their steps seem on the point of biomorphic dissolve. Affixed to each of the main frameworks is an additional cast object: a petrol can, a boot. Each includes a handmade motif to illustrate a point of intensity within the timescale of the serenade: the flammable intensity of arson or the musical wooing of the literal serenade. Reus’ interest in serial and logical systems is pitted against the essential characteristic of all of these objects: that they are sculptural forms, combinations of the semiotic, and the pure material rather than functional apparatus.

Info: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, 39 Great Jones Street, New York, Duration: 4/5-23/6/19, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, www.presenhuber.com