Ricci Albenda at Andrew Kreps - Brief Article

Any number of younger artists commonly offer takes on pop media and advertising. on the other hand few engage that "hyperreal" realm and allow it to seep palpably into our own--something Ricci Albenda did here with a hardly any sparing sculptural and architectural moves

Albenda's strategy was immediately evident in the gallery's first latitude Executed on blank, entirely white walls were individual words in black paint, each single stylized with the recognizable, a little cold manipulations of commercial graphic design. Words like "stereo" were optically energized, growing subtly larger from individual letter to the next; others similar as "ice" might become smaller from right to left Still other words appeared to bend slightly, their alphabetic characters variously floating and curving for a like reason that language and typography assumed a kind of disruptive sculptural force, seeming almost to warp the contours of the swing with their scale changes and implied perspective lines.

That disequilibrium was enhanced as true copy was paired with Albenda's "portals": vortexlike perforations cut into isolated spots in the walls around the swing so that ordinarily flat surfaces swerved and funneled inward. For example, the alphabetic characters of "kilogram" were stretched without horizontally beside one such excavation, as if distorted by means of some gravitational force vacuuming the word on the outside of this dimension and into another.

That dimension became apparent upon the other side of the wall dividing the gallery into sum of two units rooms, as the tunnel from individual "portal" in the first space lay the foundation of its reverse image in a drawn out shaft that extended out from the wall. In fact, Albenda situated the shaft's endpoint at his hold eye level, suggesting that a walk [i]or[/i] part of to the other the exhibition was one from one side the artist's own conceptual domain. In this next to the first room, words were typographically as dynamic as in the first, on the other hand here they were spelled backwards or with alphabetic characters reversed as if in a mirror. However disorienting, Albenda's negotiations of language and space, the couple conceptual and physical, are clearly inspired.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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