EDUARDO CONSUEGRA
SPECTER
MAY 14 – JUNE 18, 2011
Richard Telles Fine Art presents an exhibition of new collages, paintings, and sculptures by Eduardo Consuegra. In his new exhibition, Consuegra investigates the concept of the specter. Playfully employing various materials such as magazines, mirror, metal beads, foam and wood, he locates the projection of the specter oscillating between the eyes and the material image, and by exploiting the latter’s particular structural and symbolic components, he renders the ghost visible. It is only through Consuegra’s understanding of the particular frequency of visibility, by nature unstable and unpredictable, he renders, if only minutely, its flicker in his objects.
Consuegra enacts this project, for example, with the deceptively simple act of magazine manipulation. In Kodak, (2011), a vintage Kodak film advertisement depicting women playing tennis, is juxtaposed vertically with a photo of two young women throwing rocks. Consuegra maintains the original structure of the magazine, but with a slight alteration: he makes an incision across the Kodak ad to reveal the image of the two women on the neighboring page by flipping the upper section of the Kodak ad. In this subtle ploy, Consuegra insinuates the potential to find another rich pairing in the same magazine, inviting the pursuit of the ghosts.
This pursuit is further projected into the physical space of the gallery where Consuegra has installed a tangled, metal bead piece, which refers directly to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s series of colorful, plastic bead curtains. By stripping Gonzalez-Torres’ curtain of its intended context—as something that can be walked through—and color, by re-fashioning it into metal, Consuegra beckons the ghost of Gonzalez-Torres’ legacy, whose dissemination has been routinely altered over time with numerous remakes, garbling the work’s original message. Consuegra converts the curtain into a monolithic object that evokes the original, but is present only as a sculpture for distant contemplation. It is the space between the historical and the present, the visible phenomena and its hidden agents that activates the specter, permeating the exhibition.
The specter, as its name indicates, is the frequency of a certain visibility. But the visibility of the invisible. And visibility, by its essence, is not seen.
Eduardo Consuegra has taken part in numerous exhibitions throughout Los Angeles and abroad. His previous solo exhibitions were held at Richard Telles Fine Art in 2008 and at Paul Petro Contemporary, Toronto in 2007. In 2009, he was included in Second Nature: The Valentine/Adelman Collection, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and in Dark Places at the Santa Monica Museum in 2006. This year, he was recently included in the group exhibition, Banquet of the Black Jackal at the Luckman Gallery, and took part in a two person exhibition at Actual Size, Los Angeles in 2010. Consuegra lives and works in Los Angeles.
Eduardo Consuegra has taken part in numerous exhibitions throughout Los Angeles and abroad. His previous solo exhibitions were held at Richard Telles Fine Art in 2008 and at Paul Petro Contemporary, Toronto in 2007. In 2009, he was included in Second Nature: The Valentine/Adelman Collection, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and in Dark Places at the Santa Monica Museum in 2006. This year, he was recently included in the group exhibition, Banquet of the Black Jackal at the Luckman Gallery, and took part in a two person exhibition at Actual Size, Los Angeles in 2010. Consuegra lives and works in Los Angeles.
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