From Feb 14th through Apr 4th, 2009. 
Dot Fiftyone Gallery is presenting Bazaar, new works by Miami’s resident artist Pancho Luna. The show opens to the public with a reception on February 14th, 2009.
Bazaar is the title of Pancho Luna’s forthcoming show at Dot Fiftyone Gallery. Part design, part sculpture, Luna’s installations work as ciphers, hybrids, transient/durable artifacts between Conceptual Art and Arte Povera. The carefully realized pieces exhibit a feel for intuition mixed with conceptual precision. They express tensions between the design message (consumption and all) and its aesthetic import: A difficult negotiation no doubt.
Luna’s pieces distill the weight of process. For instance, the series “Discusiones” (Discussions) would have started as a collaged presentation of random letters but ended as a (controlled) syntactic disarray of materials, that is, the industrial detritus the letters embody. Luna piles up stuff, screwing syntax, adding foreign materials to content. The final product is glossy, sort of industrial, as if almost assimilated by the productive economic machinery. Nut wait, not necessarily.
Luna’s work of the early 2000’s showed an exploration of the condensation of meaning and language, which still shows up here, although in a less obvious manner. The work shifted a bit from semantic condensation to visual expansion. “Libros” (Books) are a series of rectangular pieces, sort of bookshelves, showing thin strips –as if book spines- in diverse colors and widths. Like in “Discusiones,” there is a play on order, sequence and materials. There are two parallel themes here: the form being almost complete, and the material revealing something missing or redundant. In other words, Luna disjoins aesthetic and the utilitarian vectors.
The “Galones de luz” (Gallons of Light) series are empty plastic jugs with light filaments inside. They look like DIY plastic lamps pointing to eco-friendly design. “Galones” function as a reverberating synecdoche: a gallon of what? (water, milk, artificially sweetened green tea?). It’s the chosen unit of measurement for petroleum: crude oil, global source of energy. Next, the plastic itself, a petroleum derivative and ubiquitous medium in Twentieth Century design (plastic injection techniques are central for many of the 1950’s-1970’s high end furniture pieces).
Luna uses plastic sheets is his “lamp mobiles”, an odd mix between Moore and Panton. The sheets of plastic diffuse, augment, divert, (hide?), light and thus possible readings of letters hardly visible from inside the lamp’s space. In this case Luna employs language as deferral: Meaning matters because it is avoided.
Expect Bazaar to be what it is: motley rhythm, a-formal, in-between, heterotypic, topstitch, open-ended and flexible. You may want to come again for more. Alfredo Triff, Miami February 2009.
Dot Fiftyone Gallery
51 NW 36th Street
Miami, FL 33127
305.573.9994
www.dotfiftyone.com
Be the first to comment