PARTIAL OBJECTS
Solo exhibition by Ariel Zambenedetti
July 5 - August 15, 2014
Behind closed doors, the objects sigh.
“But what do we want?” they ask themselves.
Venus ponders her absent digits, and the absence of their attendant anxieties.
“Not to be complete, no. But to be finished, that is enough for us. A little pride, you know, a touch of the bathos to hold us together.”
And in unison, they sing:
“The microwave is our Moreau!
Luxury our aegis!
Morsels in the suckling mouth!
Stuffed lumps of anagnorisis!
Whisper with us.”
Behind closed doors the objects have a bit of fun. It’s why old men, covetous, hid them in caves.
“Partial Objects” brings together sculptures and paintings that mine the symbolic residuum of the past in search of possible modes of semantic reconciliation. Sculptures that suggest fragments of the body’s sensual apparatus recall the spiritual emblems of archaic societies, drawing parallels between aesthetic pleasure and decidedly functional biosocial processes. Just as the viewed becomes a means of viewing, the vessel becomes protrusion, as remembrance and violence vie for prominence in a struggle of immanent negation. Paintings that bear vague resemblance to Christian motifs seek to revise the code by which the latter are read, freeing composition from the dictates of legibility while holding close to the spirit of communication in which these precedents take part. To put it frankly, “Partial Objects” is a paean to misrepresentation.
Ariel Zambenedetti is an artist who lives and works in New York City.
