PERCEPTION AND QUOTIDIANITY IN LEANDRO ERLICH
La nevera en la sala (The Fridge in the Living Room) is the arrangement through which Leandro Erlich (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1973) reinterprets his vision of perception through architecture and everyday life at Prats Nogueras Blanchard. A recurring theme in this Argentine artist’s work, the pieces exhibited at the gallery’s Madrid headquarters do not belong to a new production but rather mark the first public presentation of a series of works that engage with realism and illusion, complemented by their location and functionality within the space.
Though not strictly an installation, the exhibition necessarily interacts with the space, bridging the gap between the gallery’s role as an exhibition venue and the visitor’s experience, who inevitably enters into a vision of the ordinary and familiar. The subject of the paintings retains this functionality, depicting everyday objects with a hidden dimension, whether they be access doors or screens.
The fronts of a refrigerator and a washing machine, an airplane bathroom door, or the back of a television set invite conceptual reflection on deception, perspective, and the unknown aspects of the dimensional reality these objects suggest—yet they are ultimately reduced to a visual trick. One of the door paintings appears next to another that reflects the room’s architecture, reinforcing its nature as a copy, an optical illusion, and a playful trap that shapes the exhibition and will remain part of its new identity.
The series of paintings is complemented by Six Cycles (2018), a video installation that enhances the meaning conveyed by the canvases. The six washing machines spinning at different speeds emphasize the passage of time while also reflecting a daily existence absorbed—quite literally—by the very mechanism they depict. Immersed in the process presented in the video, one can also observe the color and form, traces of a certain chromatic baroque that, in some way, facilitate a connection to the historiographic period in which the play of dimension and perception was perhaps most fully developed.
La nevera en la sala can be visited until April 16 at Prats Nogueras Blanchard, Beneficiencia, 18-B, Madrid (Spain).
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