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Daniel Jacoby at Maisterravalbuena

September 21, 2016

Artist: Daniel Jacoby

Exhibition title: Sydney no tendría nada que ocultar si otros no tuvieran nada que temer

Venue: Maisterravalbuena, Madrid, Spain

Date: September 15 – November 12, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Maisterravalbuena

Maisterravalbuena Madrid is pleased to present Sydney no tendría nada que ocultar si otros no tuvieran nada que temer, the second solo show by Daniel Jacoby at the gallery.

In the midst of one of Lima’s commercial streets, a shop called Sydney sells the kind of locally manufactured cotton wear that are found in many other commerces. However, this one – despite its evident prosperity – has taken the noble decision to stick with the display mechanism of market vendors. Instead of manikins and sexy model photographs, they exhibit clothing flattened and pinned to walls, columns and ceiling, maximizing every square inch as showcase real estate. T-shirts stretched to square shapes, underwear stacked like an open deck of cards, socks sorted by color or size, and every pair of pants carefully folded to show both sides of the piece. With the worship of the body radically cancelled, costumers select their orders by enunciating the codes written next to each piece, as if it were a takeaway restaurant.

It strikes to realize, though, that the man responsible for this modest, democratic sales strategy responds to numerous interviews with a competitive point of view, as driven by the American dream. The fact that his shop is named after the owner’s dream city, in Australia, just starts to reveal a suspicious idealization of the First World, and the contradictions that this represents for a son of poor farmers. Nevertheless, the press strives to portray this businessman as a role model for the poor, questionably perpetrating the capitalist mentality of the survival of the fittest.

Daniel Jacoby’s new work is the latest installment of a sculptural project that aims to address the double moral of this brand. Using MDF cutouts and aluminum pieces, the artist detaches the futurist-looking clothes folding from the wall looking to highlight their lack of volume. Although every protuberance can be seen as a limb, no shape of this installation achieves to render a defined body. Released from voluptuous figures, the emphasis of these flat forms is in the quality of the product itself, rather than in the body it wraps around. The Meccanolike assembly system, furthermore, reinforces the accessibility and horizontality embedded in the roots of the Sydney philosophy.

With a mix of admiration and skepticism, the Sydney series seeks to redirect the attention towards the humane, down-to-earth values of this enterprise that the press has decided to ignore for focusing on his leader’s hunger for success. Aided by narrative titles, each work depicts the things left aside or poetically challenges the apparently unmovable truths of the shop’s visions. Sydney, as in the person’s name, is adopted as a character whose actions are told like short fables in every title.

Daniel Jacoby (Lima, 1985) has exibited at EYE Film Institut, Amsterdam; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Goethe Institut, Brazil; SESC videobrasil, Sao Paulo; Casino de Luxembourg, Luxemburgo; Kunsthalf Charlottenborg, Copenhague; Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg; Trafó, Budapest; The Banff Centre, Alberta; Les Rencontres Internationales, Paris; 11 Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador. His work has been placed in public institutions such as: CA2M Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Madrid; FRAC Île-de- France, Paris; Centre d’Art La Panera, Lleida; Fundación Cajasol, Sevilla, among others. He is recently participated with Maisterravalbuena at Art Basel 2016 with the project Sydney Went Looking for the Strangest Animal in the Jungle but Found the Rain Instead.