NEW YORK, NY.- Before Wilfrid Almendra became an artist, he studied mechanics and worked as a truck driver. The French-Portuguese artist found beauty in the industrial wastelands, community gardens, and innovative landscapes that surrounded the regions he commuted across throughout Europe. For Almendra, these terrains distinguish the remarkable intersection where human life meets the natural world. And today, Almendra’s work locates this junction, unraveling humanity’s artificial attempts to curb the environment and its commandeering presence. Almendra chronicles this central tension within his solo exhibition on view at Ceysson Bénétière from October 24th - December 14th: through sculptures and installations, the artist erects architectures of human-environment coexistence and collision.
Frequently, Almendra juxtaposes the quiet serenity of the natural world with clean modernist architecture, staging a poetic interplay between man-made structures and the spontaneous designs of the environment. Such is the case in “Labor day II” –– a glass sculpture that reflects a bucolic spring landscape. Like the windows of a pristine house, a sheet of shimmering glass is divided into three panels cast with aluminum here. Yellowing fountain grass meanders upward from a field of gentle auburn at the bottom of the work. It points us toward a sullied white tank top that’s draped lethargically across the glass — an evocative gesture that conjures the plight of a fatigued agricultural worker, submitting to a day of rest. Ultimately, in this abounding pastoral scene, Almendra embodies the spirit of a laborer with a keen eye for balance. He visualizes the land as not only a site of labor but also, reprieve, unveiling the hypnotic grandeur of the terrain itself.
But in works like “Model Home, Sonata XXIII,” and Sonata XXVIII, landscapes are rendered with much more restraint. Black steel bars that recall those found in gated domestic spaces confine exquisite vestiges of organic life. In the former, a single flower blooms from behind these bars which enclose modest cathedral glass, tinted with pink and blue tones. Together, the bands of striking color, stark textures, and neat lines converge in an elegant tableau, much like the precise compositions seen in minimalist abstraction. Organic materiality is even further subdued in the latter work. Here, a shadowed poppy flower decays behind marble, tiles, glass, and barricades. In this austere portrait of decomposition, Almendra takes a critical look at weathered infrastructure as it corrodes in parallel with biological matter.
Almendra, thus, repeatedly probes at the unpredictable exchange between the residue of human life and the imprints of the environment throughout this arresting presentation. In doing so, the artist intervenes upon age-old discourses of power as they pertain to humans and the landscapes they occupy. But Almendra does not elect a winner in this timeless duel. The artist instead invites the viewer to consider an amalgam of thrilling pairings — rousing vignettes that speak to the push and pull endured amidst interspecific connectivity. Ultimately, Almendra challenges us to lean into this existential discomfort as he reckons with the spatial, material, and aesthetic conditions that inform life on Earth.
Daniella Brito, September 2024
