Artist: Renaud Jerez
Exhibition title: Yesteday
Curated by: Dorothée Dupuis
Venue: Lodos, Mexico City
Date: August 29 – November 1, 2014
Photography: Courtesy of Lodos and the artist
If Renaud Jerez’s work has often been affiliated with IRL/URL related working processes, he stands apart by concentrating more specifically on the physical making of his pieces, which are not only reflections of online assemblages, but also approach more classically elaborated forms of sculpture and painting. At Lodos he presents a new set of works, two sculptures made with CNC cut on isolation foam and a painting. By night with torch and spears is a direct reference to an experimental film of 1942 by surrealist artist Joseph Cornell, more known for his « boxes » with which some of Jerez’s bas-reliefs share some formal affinity, notably in the way heterogeneous elements get superposed in order to create a sort of meaningful organic landscape, where textures suddenly gain some fleshy quality. On another wall, a Hollywood celebrity is looking straight at the viewer, adding a cool masculine touch to the show and functioning like a contemporary vanité. Jerez’s working process proposes a critical reflection on the way recent art history has been taking over popular culture’s images in order to interpret their circulation through the constantly updated technological means of communication. Never really using fiction as such, Jerez is thus interested in the bigger narrative promised by technology. Developing the idea of aesthetic experience as a dysfunctional interface, he then underlines the increasingly schizophrenic relationship between the mass produced devices/images and the bodies that use and consume them.
– Dorothée Dupuis
