Sebastian Gordin: The Sound of an Engine Falling / Yuxiao Ran: Fable Boulevard

5 Apr-6 May 2024

Overview

Gallery rosenfeld is delighted to present a duo exhibition featuring the Argentinian artist Sebastian Gordin and the Chinese artist Yuxiao Ran.

Gordin’s second solo exhibition in the gallery will dig deeply into his personal memory.

The poet Vanna Andreini has written very eloquently and movingly about the artist’s new body of works.
Gordin asks the question, ‘Can the sounds that pierced us be forgotten, like we forget the words of a foreign language? Or could it be that sounds resurface the way smells do, suddenly, when passing by something or someone? If they are not forgotten, what happens to them?

In this exhibition, Sebastian Gordin searches for the sounds that constitute him, that gave his life colour and depth. He dives into the sea of his memory, seeking out the songs he loved, the lyrics that accompanied him, and brings them back up to the surface:

He presents them with a support on which to float, an image to which those words are linked- whether by chance or by the unfathomable movements in the stream of memory.

In ‘The Noise of a Falling Engine’, we encounter a series of album covers made of wood and stained veneers. Sebastian Gordin delights us not only with the enigma that connects words to images, but also with the choice of colours that make up the ‘record’.

This new exhibition by the Argentinian artist does not, however, consist only of the resurfacing of the sounds that make up his flesh, but also of a mise en abyme with another group of art works.

In a very different way and with equally different intentions, the works of the Chinese artist Yuxiao Ran also draw on memory. At first impact, what strikes the viewer is the strong parentage to surrealism: However, in reality, what primarily interests the artist is exploring the limitations of pictorial language when seen in a contemporary context. Ran creates complex still-lives and landscapes which purposefully contain mundane imagery which can be found in multicultural contexts. However, the highly unusual juxtaposition of the images forces people to look at these familiar images with fresh eyes. He explains perfectly his intent: ‘by extracting the pictorial language from their original contexts, I want touse a playful way to challenge, question, and subvert our habitual reading of images and symbols. Undoubtedly, this way of creation produces chaos and a lack of logical sense, but for me, this chaos is just the kind of realism that I experience in the contemporary social environment (s)’. The artist can often present a work which, within it, contains different styles of painting. This can really throw the viewer yet his intent is very coherent with his artistic philosophy. ‘Human nature dictates that we tend to favour pattern over randomness, which ensures the order we experience in our daily lives. Won’t it be extremely disappointing and dull if painting also has to submit to this inertia of ours?’