NEW YORK, NY.- Nara Roesler New York announces Orbital Tango, a solo exhibition by Artur Lescher (b. São Paulo, Brazil, 1962) curated by Luis Pérez- Oramas, presenting an important part of the artist’s recent production.
One of the most prominent artists in the contemporary Brazilian art scene, Artur Lescher’s pieces transcend their sculptural character, crossing the boundaries between installations and objects to modify the understanding of these categories and the space in which they insert themselves. With an uninterrupted and precise dialogue with both architecture and design, Lescher has produced since the late 1980s, a core of three-dimensional work that stands out as a significant contribution to the legacy of abstraction in the Americas.
Known for his impeccable pendular sculptures, his oeuvre also addresses metaphors of labor through useless machines, it challenges physical laws through radical solutions of balance and equilibrium and evokes images of conceptual landscape through his sculptures made with straps of felt or steel, titled Rivers. His production can be labeled as constructive, and is linked to precedents in High Modernism such as Constructivism and Suprematism that Lescher transforms through his impeccable poetics of space.
Strongly linked to industrial processes, achieving extreme refinement and rigor in the mechanics of forms, Lescher’s production goes beyond a purely formal investigation. His work emphasizes imponderability, stressing the durational and accidental dimension of his works, to the extent of juxtaposing solid geometrical structures with materials characterized by impermanence or changeability, such as water, olive oil, and salt.
In the words of Luis Pérez-Oramas, ‘Lescher’s art implies, always, the practice of place as a field of movement and balance, tension and equilibrium: an Orbital Tango.’
Artur Lescher stands out in the contemporary Brazilian art scene with his three dimensional work. His pieces transcend their sculptural character, crossbreeding the boundaries of installations and objects to modify the understanding of these categories and the space in which they insert themselves. The fundamental elements of his discourse artist relies in the particular, uninterrupted and precise dialogue with both architecture and design, and on his choice of materials, which can be metal, stone, wood, felt, salts, brass and copper.
Even if Lescher’s work is strongly linked to industrial processes, achieving extreme refinement and rigor, his production does not have the form as the only purpose, actually, it goes beyond it. By juxtaposing solid geometrical structures and materials with characteristics of impermanence or changeability, such as water, olive oil, and salt, Lescher emphasizes imponderability. Or ‘the restlessness,’ as the critic and curator Agnaldo Farias remarked in relation to ‘his pieces, which oppose an exact, clean appearance transmit a sense of inquietude, as if we, the spectators, were in the imminence of watching the irruption of something, (…) which could transform into violence, into the clashing of materials, in the deformation of a body, the traces of an action that is already finished.’ This contradiction opens space for myth and imagination, essential elements for the construction process.
