ART-PRESENTATION: Ricardo Brey-Chinese Purple
Since the late 1970s, Ricardo Brey’s practice has focused on his research into the origins of humanity and humankind’s place in the world. Born in Cuba, Brey worked briefly as an illustrator and graphic designer before exhibiting in the landmark 1981 group show Volumen I at the Centro de Arte Internacional in Havana.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Alexander Gray Associates Archive
Ricardo Brey presents “Chinese Purple” at Alexander Gray Associates, in Germantown. Inviting performative engagement by unclasping the four walls of the box and unfolding them to reveal a complex web of symbols, Brey’s archival boxes from his series “Every Life is a Fire”. In “Chinese Purple” five nesting boxes unfurl like a Russian Matryoshka doll, alluding to layers of secrets. Each side of each box is lined with delicate paper bearing ornamental Baroque-inspired patterns, rendered in deep red hues borrowed from antique Chinese lacquered furniture. The centerpiece of the box is a small accordion-style booklet delicately wrapped in a gilded textile fragment from a sari, which rests on a bed of dried rosebuds within a glass cube. Juxtaposing scientific renderings of the human heart, oxidized gold leaf, and citations from Manichean texts, Brey alludes to the inherent tensions between binary concepts like life and death, dreams and nightmares, masculinity and femininity, black and white, and the manmade and organic. Through the appropriation of diverse found materials, Brey also hints at the history of Europe’s spice trade and legacies of colonialism. Reflecting on the work’s symbolic potential, Brey states, “The box is our head, the box is our cave, the box is the attic, the box is the memory and the world. The boxes are an attempt to spatially represent… a hermeneutics of the soul to create a topography of the mind”. The ongoing project “Every Life is a Fire” consists of a series of boxes that unfold to reveal miniature worlds of sculptural assemblages. For example “Heir of Nothing” (2015-17), first shown at the Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp, Belgium, opens to reveal a coronet balanced on a series of texts. In contrast to the expansive transparency of “Universe”, this work and others in the series celebrate interiority while inviting performative engagement. When these pieces were first shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art (M HKA) in Antwerp, Belgium, volunteers unfolded and folded them twice a day for viewers; their ritualized actions imbuing the boxes with the charged sacredness of reliquaries.) Engaging with concepts of internality the series poses metaphysical questions about the nature of being, constructing, in Brey’s words, a “hermeneutics of the soul”. The series “Every Life is a Fire” reveals the artist’s decades-long inquiry into how humans understand and categorize reality and themselves.
Info: Alexander Gray Associates-Germantown, Alder & Co., 222 Main Street, Germantown, New York, Duration: 5/10-17/11/19, Days & Hours: Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.alexandergray.com
