Born in 1946 in Buenos Aires (AR)
Lives and works between New York (US), Los Angeles, California (US) and Paris (FR)
1994/2013
Folded paper
4,30 x 4,60 m
Year of Purchase: 2014
Born in Buenos Aires in 1946, David Lamelas is nowadays considered to be one of the pioneers of conceptual art and experimental cinema. Initially trained as a sculptor, he gained international recognition with the multimedia installation The Office of Information about the Vietnam War at Three Levels: The Visual Image, Text and Audio presented at the Venice Biennale in 1968. This work, which analyzes the changing relationship to time and the media in a society increasingly centered on information, marks a turning point in the artist’s practice as well as the beginning of his career in Europe. The same year, he settled in London where he studied at the Central St. Martins, a British avant-garde school. Against this background, David Lamelas decided to focus on photography and video, turning his practice toward the production of “sculptural forms without volume.” He had always been fascinated with cinema, and in particular the idea of projection, the abstract beam of light that materializes as image when it hits the screen. Just as the artist has often removed his sculptures from their traditional pedestals, he has got rid of the screen in his cinematographic practice, projecting light directly onto the wall or the floor.
Over the past forty years, David Lamelas’s œuvre has continued to oscillate between sculpture, performance, and film. Pared Doblada follows that very trajectory. Astoundingly simple in both its form and gesture, the work consists of a large sheet of white paper, unfolded and skillfully pinned to the gallery wall. It is literally a collapsible wall that can be unfolded and re-folded ad infinitum, and is designed to fit into a small suitcase. First created in 1994 on the occasion of an exhibition in Buenos Aires, the work was envisioned by the artist as a replica of one of the walls in his Manhattan studio and produced by a Japanese craftsman using washi paper. The version if Pared Doblada that belongs to FRAC Lorraine is, however, a duplicate of another wall: namely, the wall of the Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery in Los Angeles. Manufactured ten years later, this second version—unlike the first one, which was made using a single large sheet of paper—consists of two sheets of paper taped together. This is an original accomplishment, which turns the work into a single piece that cannot be fully replicated.
A number of concerns recurrent in the work of David Lamelas intersect in Pared Doblada, whether relating to sculpture, the concepts of volume and space, or the abstract phenomenon of projection. Not without bearing on his work as filmmaker, this piece may perhaps be seen as a screen wherein the viewer may contemplate the architecture of they place they’re in or elsewhere. In addition to being a simple replica of the wall, this sheet of paper is an imprint of a space and its atmosphere, which are here reduced to a minimum. This is also an extract of the time of the exhibition, the materialization of an instant that is deployed and that unfolds: a portable sculpture of time and space. It must be said that David Lamelas is a keen traveler. From Buenos Aires to London, to Brussels, Paris, and New York, the artist has lived and worked in different countries, and each of these destinations has had a specific influence on his work. It is his experience of displacement and his constant effort at adaptation to new surroundings that have made David Lamelas’s oeuvre so consistently unclassifiable according to the traditional art-historical criteria, and so enduringly universal in its message.
Louise Chignac