Since 8th of March, Bucharesthas entered the red zone again.
The highest air pollution rate in Bucharestis always visible through the colour red.
The buildings with increased seismal riskare marked as dark red dots on the map.
The reading of the global maps lately hasbeen correlated to the intensities of red.
Red has become an alarming signifier,bleeding into one’s eyes with the hope that it would turn paler.
Daily Charts pushes the viewer into a state of alert.The intense red juxtaposed with the stillness of the rough metal structure ishere to simultaneously confuse and enmesh. The sunlight reflects through thered translucent walls and it moves with it throughout the day, leaving tracesin the space and on the surface of the works. With a conscious, sartorialgesture, Indrikis Gelzis amplifies his sculptures through visible nodes ofconnection, diverse textures of garments, as well as the micro-architecturethat stages the works. The multiple viewing angles place the sculptures indifferent zones and invites the promise of becoming data for something else.The artist’s practice solidifies certain values and visual grammar of graphstocks, but with a refusal to using actual data. For Gelzis, data stems frompersonal experiences, imagination, memories, art history references, situationsand other material and immaterial information. He gets thrilled to imagine how datatravels inside wires, through air, through devices and in particular how itconnects the world and activates processes.
Here, I imagine Daily charts as a choreographedmouth* that stages and utters words, languages, (mis)interpretations,sensibilities and affects. Data is represented by the movements of the mouththrough measuring its intensity, capacity and ability to speak or listen. Thesculptures weld together sounds, tensions, cavities and end up performingcollectively a visual language that the artist expresses. The metal limbs,circles, surfaces and circuits forming the sculptures transgress into mouth movements and open a terrain fortracing voices, interpretations, modulations and relations. Gelzis’ workscapture dynamics of matter and a rhythm of somatic orientation. I continueperceiving these sculptures as instruments of communication, each of whichcontours, discontinues and elaborates subjectivities. Toss this exhibition intoa playground “imbued with an overlap of language and corporeality, discourseand fantasy”*.
Fleshed out of a virtual image, Indrikis’sculptures contain a laborious process of cutting, welding, burning, bending,assembling, oiling and sewing, similar to the mouth’s ability to open,articulate, chew, yawn, laugh, mute, stutter, cry, sing, lick, bite, recite,whisper and ultimately to create the bridge between the inside and outside ofbodies. Daily charts is a portal forlanguage expressions, an architectural living entity that accommodates varioustonalities, data abstractions and movements of the mouth as a vessel thatcarries narratives to be performed, exposed and analised.
As you exit the exhibition space, pressyour tongue and ….
*Brendon LaBelle, Lexicon of the mouth, Poetics and politics of voiceand the oral imaginary.
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