ART
Ivan Navarro/Sudarshan Shetty |
Written 30 January |
Monday 07 September, 11:00Galerie Daniel Templon, 75003 [map]Ivan Navarro/Sudarshan Shetty
Taj Mahal
For his first exhibition in France, Indian artist Sudarshan Shetty’s Taj Mahal’s installation is constructed entirely from miniature reproductions of the famous palace. Born in 1961 and originally from Bombay, Shetty belongs to the generation of Indian artists, like
Subdoh Gupta and
Atul Dodiya who have made it on the international contemporary art scene.
Initially a painter, Shetty moved towards sculpture and installation. Shetty takes objects apart without dismantling them, decoding them by revealing their mechanical being. He experiments with found objects in a variety of media with the idea of creating an emotionally charged experience.
His strange constructions, mixing daily objects, skeletons, and fragments of mechanical elements offer us a meditation on the relationship between living and the inanimate, spirituality and consumption. As he says himself “my idea is to create a monument using everyday objects from the middle class”. For this installation the artist has built, with the help of hundreds of mini metallic Taj Mahals, a piece which reflects the notion of absence (the famous palace was constructed in the 17th century by the emperor
Shâh Jahân in memory of his dead wife), this installation can be read as a commentary on Indian contemporary society, its economy and its paths to a shiny modernisation.
Nowhere Man
Nowhere Man is a parade of luminous figures inspired by the famous pictograms from the Olympic Games, created by German graphic artist
Otl Aicher. Originally from Chilli,
Iván Navarro has been working in New York for the past 10 years. He became well known thanks to his spectacular trompe l’oeil sculptures. Taking the light as the base material his work plays on the references to modernism, from
Gerrit Rietveld to
Ellsworth Kelly passing by
Dan Flavin and
Tony Smith, and changing everyday objects (table, chair, door) into electric sculptures. References to history of art become the pretext to a subtle political and social critique.
With these “nowhere men”, Navarro looks at the ideology behind the Olympic Games and our relationship with the perfect body. The people are anonymous; they don’t represent any race, nor do the Olympic rings. As the artist explains “each ring is supposed to represent a continent and I often wondered which colour represented which continent. Is Asia represented by red? Is Africa yellow?” These haunting personages, only visible in obscurity, suggest a metaphor for the links between human and machine, and between humanism and modernism.
Born in 1972 in Santiago, Iván Navarro grew up under the dictatorship of Pinochet. Living in the US since 1997 his work has been exhibited worldwide and often remains haunted by questions of power, control and physical and psychological imprisonment.
