Paris Internationale19.10.2022–23.10.2022Ana Navas, Malte Zenses
Sperling presents Ana Navas and Malte Zenses at Paris Internationale 2022.
Ana Navas (*1984, Quito, Ecuador, lives and works in Rotterdam, NL)
Transparencies, 2020-2022, arises from the artist’s interest in the narratives spurred from ethnographic objects and how they are displayed. The series takes photographic records of displays from now-disappeared museums – for example, the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée Ethnographique du Trocadéro in Paris– where objects deemed «exotic» were sheltered in vitrines, following museum models with a scientific approach. These mise-en-scènes, a visual language that constrains the objects within a specific ideology, are meticulously disarticulated by the artist: She deconstructs the photographs into layers and depicts each one of them in translucent fabrics placed over metallic racks and rods. Although these ways of representing the world are now defunct, or have simply been replaced by new trends, is it possible to proclaim the extinction of such gaze?
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Malte Zenses on his new paintings:
The new series comprises paintings that draw on the vocabulary of Abstract Painting and New Realism and integrate fragments from everyday life such as notes, tags or comic images. This cross-media approach allows me to view the works as set pieces of a conversation, which only communicate a multi-layered commentary on the current zeitgeist in their juxtaposition. The lettering, signs and symbols are used as ciphers that mark a realm beyond the visible and allude to a sense of disillusionment. It is a disillusionment that stems from the realization that the collapse of the world - in the form of the pandemic, resource scarcity and global warming - is a man-made consequence. This preoccupation is also based on an ambivalent fascination with a turning point in time in which the terrible and the radiant coexist.
The text fragments are taken from the film “The Omega Man”, an American literary adaptation from 1971 by Boris Sagal. It is based on the science fiction novel “I am Legend” by the American writer Richard Matheson. Most of the quotes are fragments of the protagonist Robert Neville's soliloquies.
Malte Zenses, September 2022
