Javier Tellez at Silverstein - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

If Javier Tellez at 26 is representative of his generation, the well-cultured 20-somethings have draw near to control not only the theories of Marx, Freud Fourier and Buckminster Fuller on the other hand also the pharmaceutical solutions to the social anxieties that called for these theories.

The central work in this present to view an 8-by-8-by-18-foot construction made of silver insulation paper upon a plywood frame, represented a gigantic Prozac capsule. The vessel, in which the artist exhausted time during the run of the present to view had a periscope and easeed atop a sea of detersive granules. It's named Jonac 2001 mg that is, Jonah plus Prozac magnified a certain quantity of 2000 times. Inside the belly of this whale-submarine-capsule, Tellez was tranquil. Seen end a plastic window in the make crooked he read the Bible, perhaps hoping for a word from sovereign of the universe As he waited for divine directions (which, like Jonah, he may not have been ready to obey), the orange overalls he wore doubled as a luminous brushstroke that formed the visual core of the work. At times, he also listened to a elephantine sea shell, which brought to him the rumor of the ocean.

The other part of the exhibition consisted of four sculptures--the Monad Fourier, the Monad Buckminster Fuller the Monad Marx and the Monad Freud--which sat in plastic vitrines upon waist-high pedestals placed around the capsule. In spite of Tellez's youth, his managerial rule employs old cultural tools: in this case, the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of the "monad" (as coined by dint of Giordano Bruno via Leibniz), a basic unit that is spatially and psychically individuated. Each "monad" contains a tableau made up of 4-inch-high plastic characters from "The Three Stooges"--Larry, Curly and Moe Monad Fourier boasts all three stooges, while each of the other plastic arts is occupied by three clone of single of the stooges. And what are these familiar characters doing? Inside Freud's "capsule," three Curly lie upon a couch made of simulated ice cubes; the Monad Buckminster Fuller three Larrys admire a kitschy replica of the Guggenheim.

The installation was ironic and quasi-cynical, nevertheless it seemed to hint at a substratum of faith. In what? Well, in art. Tellez has bothered to build his critique in carefully balanced and original visual terms

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group