Richard Rezac at The Renaissance Society

(link)

but different from minimalism in their contaminating themselves in faint veils of cultural signifiers. These look purposed. Look like other things vaguely. As their power.  "the elusive mechanisms of interpretation," They appear designed but without a purpose we can ascertain. We are so accustomed to objects bent to our service that appearing without purpose we call alien. The power of the uncanny is to teach us what we expect from certain forms by removing the parts that would cause recognition replaced with mystery, instead all the doohickies and flimflams and us wondering why we expected it to begin with. The flux capacitor must only look like the expectations a public has for such an object.


See too: Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

(link)

Writing in the LA Times, David Pagel called Rezac "dyslexic minimalism." The metaphor is functional, Rezac's sculptures follow the syntax of a language but disordered, their ordering law unavailable yet suggesting a function or ergonomics. And today we are more than acclimated to objects and commodities adapted to us, and any object displacing suggestion for the function they provide (to us) produces an uncanny effect. We say they look otherworldly, alien, simply because we don't know what good they are to us. This makes them strange.


See too: Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon , Nancy Lupo at Wallspace