Xippas is pleased to present Ricardo Lanzarini’s El baile interminable exhibition in Punta del Este. A solo collection by the artist that brings together his famous JOB series of miniature drawings, an ink series of body gestures and his most recent work with color in oil pastel that bursts into the dance of his characters.
Urban interventions, aesthetic practices with conflictive social groups and site-specific installations have marked in this artist a trajectory based fundamentally on three aspects: conceptual reflection, the symbolic construction of space and drawing as the syntax of a complex thought.
The evolution and setbacks of Lanzarini’s graphic art over almost thirty years are nothing other than the history of each of the pieces that make up this exhibition; on the other hand, they assume on this occasion a strong aesthetic autonomy with respect to that history. Indeed, in Baile interminable the artist shows an unexpected formal outburst, although this does not compromise the thematic and conceptual continuity characteristic of his work.
He changes the space in which the human figure exercises its symbolic function: it is now located in the centre of the paper, which is the center of his political space. It has ceased to relate to other figures in order to present itself isolated and reiterated (with slight differences), but the figure has obtained a symbolic coverage that encompasses the whole spectrum of «political intriguers, priests, military men, popes, exhibitionists, torturers, presenters» acting on a noisy stage, subjected to the most ludicrous choreographies
One day I imagined a beach where there were very obese people who did not touch or talk to each other. The paper was the sand and there were, of course, different sands: smooth white ones, white striped ones from school notebooks, rough ones from napkin paper, brown sands from cement bags and many others…
Thirdly, the «white sand» where those corpulent figures were born years ago has now become a furious context of exciting colours crossed by electric flows.
Painting is what takes the initiative here to define a politics of space, in context; the electrical flow responds, fundamentally, to the double sign of the political space acted out on paper (the space of paper; the role of space). «This cyclical variation of meaning that only the gaze can capture intermittently, is the beginning of the alternating current that runs through and shakes each one of the scenes of this Baile interminable»1
Gabriel Peluffo Linari – Marzo, 2022
Text written for the new catalog El baile interminanble
