José Luis Landet
Dot Fifty One. Miami
The term ‘sesera’ (brainpan) refers to the part of the skull that encloses the brain and the grey matter itself, while at the same time it also serves to describe the person who acts with prudence and good judgment. For José Luis Landet, ‘sesera’ is all this and much more, and it becomes the subject of a painstaking investigation that leads him to unravel, here and there, the mysteries along the inscrutable winding roads of memory.
Sesera is also the title of his solo show at Dot Fifty One Gallery in the Design District. In it, the artist devotes himself to the scrutiny of the complex weft of memory, relying on the constructivist aesthetics of Russian origin and on the world of billboards. It is not by chance that the artist should rely on the world of design, whose effectiveness in the field of communication demands the utiliza- tion of clear signs acting as triggers in our memory.
Landet is interested in the analysis of the communication process, hence the recurrence to clearly iconic figures from our common repertory. Easily recognizable signs that are repeated once and again, with minimal variations.
Particularly noteworthy in this respect is his animated work, The Reason of the Will. In this work the artist bombards us with a myriad habitual symbols (piano, chair, table, box) which, in an accelerated rhythm, arouse in us a double feeling. On the one hand, the pleasant identification with forms that are familiar to us; on the other hand, animation brings to mind the experiment carried out by Lev Kuleshov, master of Russian montage in the early 20th century, in which the creator superimposed upon the face of the actor, devoid of expression, planes with details of objects, inducing the public to read expressions of love, sadness or anger on the impassive face. Both Kulechov and Landet are obsessed by the psychological character that experience and memory impart to the decoding of meanings. The Reason of the Will is a sort of intellectual gymnastics that forces us to reposition ourselves all the time. Here Landet plays with the associative process in which memory participates, a leitmotif that animates his entire artistic proposal.
Landet’s works stand out for their simplicity and the masterly use of color. Once the painting is finished, the artist proceeds to cut it, disarticulating the canvas into tiny portions which will later be the object of recomposition in a whimsical symbiosis. The acts of creation, destruction and re-creation function as an allegory for reminiscence and oblivion.
The notions of cut, fragment and reiteration are some of the basic concepts employed by Landet in his inquiry into the processes of association and decoding of memory. His paintings are always reconstructions of a work which has already disappeared and only persists in the artist’s memory. The new work the fruit of meticulous recomposition is a puzzle of graceful and alternate rhythms, in which the power of evocation and the elicited spaces provoke us beyond the physical boundaries of the painting.
