Artist: Nicolás Lamas
Exhibition title: Liminality
Venue: SABOT, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Date: October 31 – December 22, 2018
Photography: YAP Studio / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and SABOT, Cluj-Napoca
In the eyes of many human beings, life appears to be a unique and special phenomenon. There is, of course, some truth to this belief, since no other planet is known to bear a rich and complex biosphere. However, this view betrays an “organic chauvinism” that leads to underestimate the vitality of the processes of self-organization in other spheres of reality. It can also make us forget that, despite the many differences between them, living creatures and their inorganic counter-parts share a crucial dependence on intense flows of energy and materials. In many respects the circulation is what matters, not the particular forms that it causes to emerge. As the biogeographer Ian G. Simmons puts it, “The flows of energy and mineral nutrients through an ecosystem manifest themselves as actual animals and plants of a particular species”. Our organic bodies are, in this sense, nothing but temporary coagulations in these flows: we capture in our bodies a certain portion of the flow at birth, then release it again when we die and micro-organisms transform us into a new batch of raw materials. [excerpt from “A thousand years of nonlinear history”, by Manuel DeLanda]
The second solo show of Nicolás Lamas at SABOT gathers a series of ‘transitional’ objects in a large assembly, a ‘passage-evironment’ populated by amalgamated entities placed in ambiguous, provisory situations. Each of these objects exists overtime; some steady, others ephemeral, but all marked by liminal connotations.
All the energy of the interactive situation object/subject in Nicolás Lamas’ work becomes something dialectical, a sort of action and counter-action unfolding through time. The entanglement between ideas and particles, the continual honing of speculation and making through emerging materials, the occlusion of evidences and the loosening of subversive energies trapped in objects are features shared both by Nicolás’ work and archaeological disciplines. Every site opened up and engaged through the craft skills of making objects or through the sensibility to liberate them has the transformative potential to shape a type of archaeology that transcends the human category to position objects within new systemic structures.Adopting this attitude allows him to resist the constructed perception of matter as a passive entity, a stance that is both symbolic and liberating. After all, the fact that everyday objects are embedded in unexpected combinations is as much an act of rearticulating human grammars as it is an act of empowering objecthood. [excerpt from “Matter exists differently here”, by Alejandro Alonso Díaz]
