ATHANASIOS ARGIANAS, SEBASTIAN DIAZ MORALES, MAGNUS THIERFELDER
“Et dansent sur le papier
J’écoute
Quelqu’un qui frappe du pied
La voûte” *
(Guillaume Apollinaire, À LA SANTÉ from Alcools)
Duration: June 20 – July 14, 2017
Decades before computer graphics and music videos, Oskar Fischinger (1900 – 1967) created exquisite “visual music” using geometric patterns and shapes choreographed tightly to classical music and jazz. Films of extraordinary beauty and rhythmic power.
As a starting point of Fischinger’s abstract musical animations, Qbox brings together a group exhibition that deals with movement, repetition and rhythm. Participating artists are Athanasios Argianas (GR/UK), Sebastian Diaz Morales (AR/NL) and Magnus Thierfelder (SE) showing new and recent works.
Athanasios Argianas constructs objects, which encode pieces of music that he may have composed in the past, and designs objects to be used as structures for potential performances. He uses games, closed circuits, language and sound, while his different shapes and light constructions create poetical landscapes.
A Sequencer (two C zero), 2017, is at first, a static neon light in a repetitive form. Upon closer inspection, each structure has a mollusk shell attached on its structure, “cemented” onto its tubes. The lit structure at some point flickers, the light dies down erratically, in a kind of pattern. This lasts a few seconds and it regains its stable state.
Elsewhere in the space, there is a spoken word audio piece, dimly audible. The light, somewhat animistic, flickers as if it speaks the same text, one we cannot hear though as it speaks it in light.
Sebastian Diaz Morales makes films and video installations where reality is confounded with fiction.
In Pasajes I (2012) and Pasajes II (2013) the city of Buenos Aires appears as an endless maze where an optional image to reality takes shape. This is the geography of a story expressed in an alteration to the normal, which arises from a montage of urban spaces. The urban reworking of the story is an attempt to regenerate the body of a city and its images in the form of an alternative geography.
Magnus Thierfelder rearticulates objects, situations and events discovered in his long walks. Walking is a necessity for the artist, a practice that uses movement and body. Movement is described from the stillness of objects and frozen moments.
In Spring (2011) a little accident in the water pipe system of the gallery space causes a permanent leak, which obstructs normality. A rain from the right (2017) is made of nails hammered on the wall by the window and looks like an oversized drawing of a menacing rain about to flood the space. These two temporal works are installed opposite a frozen moment of man’s fragile balance. Untitled (listen, hear, weigh), 2017, is a metal rail on which a pair of shoes struggles to keep the balance so that they keep going without falling.