Leandro Erlich at Prats Nogueras Blanchard, Madrid

Prats Nogueras Blanchard is delighted to announce the exhibition La nevera en la sala [The fridge in the living room], by Argen-tinean artist Leandro Erlich (Buenos Aires, 1973).

The architecture of the everyday is a recurring theme in Erlich’s practice, aimed at creating a dialogue between what we believe and what we see, just as he seeks to close the distance between the museum or gallery space and daily experience. The ar-tist’s fifth exhibition at the gallery, La nevera en la sala further explores this concern through elements that inhabit the domestic sphere, introducing a series of paintings of doors of household objects -a fridge, a washing machine, the rear of a television, and even one of the gallery’s own doors-.

While reaching the height of its splendour in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, the practice of deceiving the viewer by making the painted seem real through optical and perspective illusions was already being explored by the ancient Greeks. A foundational story told by Pliny the Elder concerning the practice of illusionism described a fifth-century BCE competition between the Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius to ascertain who is the better artist: Zeuxis creates grapes so lifelike that birds are drawn to peck at them, while Parrhasius surpasses him by painting a curtain so realistically that it deceived Zeuxis himself. In 1964, Lacan remarked upon this myth, suggesting that humans are captivated not merely by the truth concealed by deception, but by the idea of what remains hidden. The fascination with what lies obscured behind a door engenders a state of suspended truth, which Erlich uses to reflect on the distance between representation and reality, as well as the nature of the pictorial activity itself.

Recalling the self-reflexive devices and perspectival manipulations that characterize the Baroque, where doors, windows, corri-dors, and other thresholds where infinetly represented through painting, this dialectic between reality and illusion is portrayed by Leandro Erlich in the contemporary domestic space. A living entity, perpetually in a state of change and evolution, influenced by social and cultural factors, Erlich’s interpretation of this space encompasses ideological, symbolic, and emotional dimen-sions.

The threshold-paintings are accompanied by the installation Six Cycles in which six tumble dryers spin their contents at full speed. The spinning colours once again refers to the pictorial; the movement of the dryers delineates a form of temporality distinct from that measured by conventional clocks, contemplating the relationship between the cosmic and the domestic. As Deleuze posits, ‘reality is a web of forces’; in La nevera en la sala, the artist invites us to discern some of these forces, prompting us to interrogate the mechanisms that generate, capture, enrich—or impoverish—and ultimately reinvent our subjectivity.