Magali Reus: As mist, description: South London Gallery

Magali Reus creates sculptures that are seemingly recognisable, often appropriating the symbolism of ordinary objects from our immediate surroundings. The meticulous surfaces of the works combine conventionally analogue gestures with complex casting and moulding techniques, seamlessly integrating details such as autographs of famous athletes, graffiti and ornaments from architecture. Throughout the work there is a flourish of mechanisation relocated to the handmade and vice versa. The result is sculptural works that appear with an unclear, unsteady identity situated between the commonplace and the hyperreal. Reus relates to seeing by observing, collecting and reinterpreting details in the world around us, prompting a distance and a delay in our reading of objects and images. Her imagery and its expected material properties do not necessarily correspond, so that objects appear mediated and modified, just as our screen-based culture’s rendering of reality is often a manipulated version of the world. 

For As mist, description Reus presents a new body of work, first shown at Bergen Kunsthall and comprising two series of sculptures that unfold in spatial chapters articulated through a bespoke architectural framework. Crane, 2017, however, is a stand-alone work: a large desk-like composition positioned to become a sculptural obstacle. Stripped of the dialogue associated with the real gallery reception desk it notionally repeats, it functions in the manner of a façade or hoarding more than a welcoming gesture. It is composed of numerous sections of cast and milled materials, its surfaces smooth and cleanly pastel, yet clearly relative to the impermanence of a site under construction. Nomadic bodies or psychic states in transit are referred to through motifs such as mattress springs, magazine covers and archaeological fragments. Oversized and unmanned, Crane functions like an anchor that ties every subsequent gesture in the exhibition back to its beginning. The numbers engraved on its surface, based on the water level measure from a ship’s hull, recur through the architecture that follows, while myriad other symbols and material conceits echo throughout the show. Crane therefore suggests that the information stored within it might be extracted and used as an operational manual for the exhibition as a whole. It implies a provisional dialogue with a matrix of external worlds: from the habitual yet aspirational lifestyle of a young and mostly absent day-worker to the more sinister control of a globally dispersed corporation. 

The Hwael series (2017) consists of a number of sections, seemingly broken off from a larger whole and distributed through the gallery in the rhetorical manner of a fragmented whale skeleton. The effect is ruinous, yet in progress. Proportionally analogous to the skeletal framework of the public bus, these metal structures reference the supply of movement of both body and machine through urban space. The bones of these sculptures are left unclad, raw in the sense of the fleshless rib cage of a beached and long desiccated whale. Hwael employs the visual language of both classical decorative ironwork and ergonomic kit manufacture. Mounted on the skeletal frameworks, the visual motif of a backpack acts as a signifier for the transport of goods of an undisclosed content. The bag represents a typological form, the manifestations of which share the mutual properties of bodily connection and mimicry: the outside shell, like our skin, is a protective membrane for the non-uniform content of the insides. Reus’s backpack form was designed using a 3-dimensional computer program, thus allowing subtle manipulations of size and format within the conditions of a universally recognizable program. Like cells undergoing subtle metamorphoses of shape or purpose, the backpacks feel isolated from the display functions of each particular work’s theme, yet also complicit as links with an overall program of biomorphic unity. The details on their external surfaces (typefaces, embroidery work, embossed typographic moulding) in turn add flourishes to this formal language, embellishments that force the importance of distinct character or personifying gestures within the set template. 

The Sentinel sculptures (2017) share certain characteristic features with fire extinguishers and are strategically positioned throughout the space as markers of potential utility. For Reus the fire extinguisher is a conceptually beautiful composition: a contained unit of pressure and liquid that is rarely mobilized but frequently repurposed (to prop open doors or, in the case of hoses and inset units, to instil a sense of calm and security). Composed of both cast and individually woven textile sections, Reus’s notional devices are hung alongside brackets that appear to be in a molten or liquid state. The heat conventionally quelled by extinguishers is thus implicit in the making of the works. Embroidered and engraved text coupled with airbrushed image details add surface decoration indicative of branding or instruction manual graphics. Fabricated using bespoke weaving methods, the mix of the slow thoughtfulness of the weave with the utilitarian economy of the fibreglass and metals exemplifies the complex changes of speed and attention involved in the production of all the works in the exhibition. 

All the works in As mist, description appear to be in a state of unfolding motion, in transition between different temporal stages; frozen in the process of becoming (mid-render), caught in the midst of a function (mid-use), or in a state of restoration, ruin or abandonment. There is frequent multiplication in Reus’ works. Throughout the exhibition, variations on similar objects appear in different places, on different scales and/or with varying degrees of detail. Like teeth, bricks or rows of houses, they enact the formal grammar of an object obviously connected to a larger and more purposeful system or logic. Her work considers the way comic exaggeration or stylised appropriation can shift the rhythm of the decoding of a surface by a viewer. 

Photo by plastiques