Double Transparency

at Art Unlimited, Basel
with Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon

Double Transparency is a freestanding traversable structure of twelve wood frames spanned with transparent printed fabric to form a room-like enclosure. Walls that would normally offer solid support are transformed here into permeable vehicles of information. Three architectural sculptures are interspersed throughout the installation, two of which physically penetrate the permeable walls at half height and continue on the other side like a reflection.

The floor plan implies a modern apartment under construction, or a glass pavilion. Delicate and fleeting reflections impart a sensation of reflectivity, although they are printed on material as opposed to glass.

The transparency of the work connotes high-tech architecture and fleeting media images, but also, figuratively speaking, the act of seeing through: the pervasive superimposition of information and images that can no longer be viewed independently of each other. Here they contrast with the physically constructed space.

Images of cityscapes, still lives of everyday life—construction sites, interiors, and vistas—are printed on the fabric, excerpts of everyday situations in modernist and postmodernist cities that, much like wastelands or rubbish landscapes, lie on the periphery of attention.

The roughly textured surfaces of the three stuccoed sculptures—fragmentary curved windowsills and pedestals—are suggestive of exterior façades or interior walls. This flips the space inside out, equalizing the two spaces, and counters the experience of the omnipotence of labyrinthine simultaneity with the built obstacles as a tactile confrontation.

The previous exhibition, #Transparent Things, referred to the metaphysics of memory in Nabokov’s novel of the same name, in which the object is viewed through to its origin time.