Bunkering In Paradise/ The Rest of Us Just Live in It

Artuner has rented a 14,000 sqf warehouse space 10 minutes from the Artissima to show works by Adriano Costa (b.1975, São Paulo), Max Ruf (b.1982, Berlin) andSebastian Lloyd Rees (b.1986, Stavanger) from November 6th to November 12th.

In varying ways the three artists all attend to the specificities of place. Whether they be nirvanas or netherworlds, the works examine places as sites with specific co-ordinates, constellations of objects, processes and stories that, in their configurations become pregnant with social, economic and historical significance. By mining the diverse,constituent parts of a given locale the artists excavate, recover, reveal and re-present its residues, drawing both on material fragments and memories, to engage as well as expand the viewers relationship to place.

Max Ruf ́s canvases and recordings obliquely mirror the traditional genre of sur le motif painting. The pressure of
outdoors become both the stage and object of an unpoised eagerness to capture, to take and to leave behind. In his
work, the fine fissures between place and memory are jacked up by the erratics of causality; Ruf employs this tactic to tether his paintings to place whilst maintaining a set of open possibilities and unanswered suggestions that refuse interpretive foreclosure. The ceding of authorial intent is exemplified by his tendency to allow paintings to press against each other. This butterfly technique (often executed in the back of Ruf’s van whilst he drives around the countryside)is descriptive of the conditions of the work’s transit, just as much as of its production. The image is constructed through its journey from site of production to site of consumption – it speaks of departure and arrival, proximity and distance, in the same breath.

Sebastian Lloyd Rees navigates the forgotten urban spaces from which he dredges the objects he re-presents as art.
He encounters the hidden economies invested in objects, objects that are ready to spill their stories with only a minimal amount of intervention. What Lloyd Rees recovers from the urban space is always already revelatory; his appropriation of the dis/mis-used fragment – a Budweiser sign, a door, an construction hoarding – encourages the overlooked narrative latent within the object, to be questioned recursively. As works of art they become subject to an interrogation that privileges the social, political and cultural specificities of their production, consumption and obsolescence.

Adriano Costa‘s work has always been predicated on a compositional poetry that charms the narrative from the object. His arrangements are often full of a quiet, at times absurd, pathos. It is this empathetic capacity that provides continuity between his sculptural and 2-D works and the performance Costa presents here.
POPCORNPINGPONGPAINTINGS makes plain is that Costa is a dramatist, it is why tragedy and comedy are often folded into the same work with so little incongruity. Poetry is too often used as an escape car in which to flee from the
political. It is testament to Costa’s consummate erudition of the object that he is able to use people as the middle term between the two.