04 May 2010

Carla Arocha & Stéphane Schraenen at KORAALBERG Gallery, Antwerp

KORAALBERG is proud to present a new solo exhibition of CARLA AROCHA & STEPHANE SCHRAENEN in the Project Space of the gallery. This show is the fourth in a series of 5 'sequences'.

The art of Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen evokes many relationships with preceding movements in art. Almost all of these associations relate to the umbrella of Modernism and the gradated ontology of its progeny later in the twentieth century; it evokes the formal qualities of Minimalism as much as the optical illusions of Op Art. And yet, it is actually neither. It is not what it is and it is not what it seems. Hidden beneath the outward layers of immediate similarity is a practice that, while never denying what it admires about or has learned from these movements, remains fundamentally post-modernist; post-modern not as a visual facsimile of the received vernacular from the 1980's, but in terms of the oft-misunderstood philosophies and bodies of theory accurately associated with the term.

Their focus is less on objects as manifest things and more with the perception of things as objects. Ultimately, their installation sculptures are flat, composed of many small components but they can be perceived a monumental and emphatic. This overt presence of the formal and conceptual in Arocha-Schraenen's work can be deceptive. Everywhere within works – whether bluntly opaque or deceptively transparent- we encounter the narrative.

Theirs is a practice full of implied stories, flickers of meaning or potentially autobiographical fragments. It is cinematic without initially appearing so. It is the accumulation of precisely placed ideas into a locus in which the narrative experience of the sentient organism is never underestimated. The formal aspects of the work rely strongly on the conscious experience of sensory perception and its gradual shifts: the audience lives through a narrative in seeing other narratives present.

Ken Pratt

Carla Arocha (°1961, Caracas, Venezuela) and Stéphane Schraenen (°1971) live and work in Antwerp, Belgium and work together since 2006.