Magali Reus: DINOSAURS: Circuit, Lausanne, Switzerland
Past exhibition
Installation Views
Press release
Circuit is pleased to invite Magali Reus for her first monographic exhibition in Switzerland. A Dutch artist living in London, his work has already been loaned to Circuit in 2009 during the collective exhibition Vérité Tropicale, as well as in 2012, during Liste 17, the young art fair (Basel), with his video Offshore. Today she presents her new exhibition: Dinosaurs.
As exotic as it is premonitory, the taxonomy of dinosaurs has become mythical by virtue of its total extinction. Ecological metaphors, these heavy, cold-blooded silhouette-creatures ended up disappearing in an impossible chaos, and saw their bones fossilized in the mudflats and marshy puddles of history. In the exhibition Dinosaurs, Magali Reus imagined the series of sculptures Lukes on a new anthropomorphic model. Like its titles, which take “body”, its forms approach the scale and materiality of freezers. However, without being equipped with the expected equipment and its integrated circuits, the works are relegated to archaeological status. Like shadows or poor accessories without their supposed functionality, the Lukes are no longer temperature regulators, but containers to be activated, series of open propositions.
Their rectangular asymmetric forms accommodate the luxuriant petite compositions. Unified on plywood platforms coated with a phenolic film, the Lukes are held in chemical paralysis. Like fossils, their skins and skeletons provide information on content or personality. A rigid phosphate enema; blocks of milky raspberries stacked in a milky glaze. Everywhere, the hand and the animal, the mechanics and the analog freeze in a maelstrom that is neither industrial nor commercial, but specific and strategically disconcerting.
Photos by Annik Wetter
