Indrikis Gelzis at Suprainfinit

Artist: Indrikis Gelzis

Exhibition title: Daily charts

Venue: Suprainfinit, Bucharest, Romania

Date: March 24 – May 1, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Suprainfinit, Bucharest

Since 8^th of March, Bucharest has entered the red zone again.

The highest air pollution rate in Bucharest is always visible through the colour red.

The buildings with increased seismal risk are marked as dark red dots on the map.

The reading of the global maps lately has been correlated to the intensities of red.

Red has become an alarming signifier, bleeding into one’s eyes with the hope that it would turn paler.

Daily Charts pushes the viewer into a state of alert. The intense red juxtaposed with the stillness of the rough metal structure is here to simultaneously confuse and enmesh. The sunlight reflects through the red translucent walls and it moves with it throughout the day, leaving traces in the space and on the surface of the works. With a conscious, sartorial gesture, Indrikis Gelzis amplifies his sculptures through visible nodes of connection, diverse textures of garments, as well as the micro-architecture that stages the works. The multiple viewing angles place the sculptures in different zones and invites the promise of becoming data for something else. The artist’s practice solidifies certain values and visual grammar of graph stocks, but with a refusal to using actual data. For Gelzis, data stems from personal experiences, imagination, memories, art history references, situations and other material and immaterial information. He gets thrilled to imagine how data travels inside wires, through air, through devices and in particular how it connects the world and activates processes.

Here, I imagine Daily charts as a choreographed mouth* that stages and utters words, languages, (mis)interpretations, sensibilities and affects. Data is represented by the movements of the mouth through measuring its intensity, capacity and ability to speak or listen. The sculptures weld together sounds, tensions, cavities and end up performing collectively a visual language that the artist expresses. The metal limbs, circles, surfaces and circuits forming the sculptures transgress into mouth movements and open a terrain for tracing voices, interpretations, modulations and relations. Gelzis’ works capture dynamics of matter and a rhythm of somatic orientation. I continue perceiving these sculptures as instruments of communication, each of which contours, discontinues and elaborates subjectivities. Toss this exhibition into a playground “imbued with an overlap of language and corporeality, discourse and fantasy”*.

Fleshed out of a virtual image, Indrikis’ sculptures contain a laborious process of cutting, welding, burning, bending, assembling, oiling and sewing, similar to the mouth’s ability to open, articulate, chew, yawn, laugh, mute, stutter, cry, sing, lick, bite, recite, whisper and ultimately to create the bridge between the inside and outside of bodies. Daily charts is a portal for language expressions, an architectural living entity that accommodates various tonalities, data abstractions and movements of the mouth as a vessel that carries narratives to be performed, exposed and analised.

As you exit the exhibition space, press your tongue and ….

Curatorial text written by Cristina Vasilescu

*Brendon LaBelle, Lexicon of the mouth, Poetics and politics of voice and the oral imaginary.