Infinite Possibilities
Review of the LAb[au] Exhibition - Painting, Writing, Calculating, Transcoding
Dan Contemporary Gallery, São Paulo, Brazil
text by: Luiz Armando Bagolin
written for: Newcity Brazil, English-language digital publishing operation focused on the visual art culture of Brazil
In Jorge Luis Borges' fantastic tale, The Library of Babel, the narrator, a librarian born in one of the innumerable hexagonal chambers that make up the library, walks alone through its vast corridors, searching for a forbidden book, "the catalog of all catalogs." The character says: "the mystics claim that ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber with a large circular book of continuous spine, that follows the entire circumference of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. That cyclical book is God." Borges imagines his library as a rational labyrinth that imprisons men in their quest for knowledge, whose designation is inscribed in the very architectural structure (something in permanent suspension in ethereal space) which, although it obeys a geometric order, remains an indecipherable enigma for those inside it. For Borges, the library is a metaphor for the universe itself!
Similarly, the Belgian multidisciplinary group LAb[au] has, for some years, been producing works of astonishing rationality, systematizing a kind of library in constant mutation, based on the construction of systems and random operations (sometimes produced with the help of AI) that push our perceptual apparatus and, along with it, what we can call art, to its limits. These systems constitute the construction of a unique lexicon (at some point no longer controllable by its creators) capable of restructuring language in an unprecedented way through known and previously informed codes. Thus, in the installations, objects, sculptures, and paintings made by the collective, the image or what we see is only the partial result of a process triggered by a mathematical operation that, regardless of what we think or not when we receive it, self-generates until a conclusion whose time is no longer suitable for the scale of human life chronology.
LAb[au], Laboratory of Art and Urbanism – is an artistic collective founded in 1997 by Manuel Abendroth and Jérôme Decock. Its network of collaborators includes artists such as Els Vermang (2003-2022) and Thibault Drouillon (since 2023), among others. With more than 25 years of activity, the collective brings its first exhibition to Brazil, at Dan Arte Contemporânea, a gallery traditionally also committed to the history of Brazilian art with constructive tendencies. Therefore, it is somewhat ironic to realize that some of the works presented (Chronoprints, 2013, for example) could, at first glance, be thought of as radical developments of the proposals carried out by the concretism of the Grupo Ruptura, for example, of the fractured geometries using industrial materials by Luiz Sacilotto, or of the images generated on perforated continuous paper printers by Waldemar Cordeiro.
Manuel Abendroth clarifies, however, that not only did the technological means used by LAb[au] not exist in the 1950s, but (more importantly) the collective does not share nor base its work on the utopian notions of historical modernism. Abendroth sees a clear break in the 1960s, starting with the conceptual art of Joseph Kosuth, the research of the English group Art & Language, and the French Support Surfaces, among others, from which it became possible to produce and understand art today based on operations that involve plastic and architectural visuality in interaction with language, with the universal lexicon, and with algorithmic logic.
Indeed, in the works presented, there are more dissimilarities than similarities with the modern heritage. The notion of time (which is not chronological time) implies a philosophical sense regarding the reflection on duration, of a Bergsonian nature, of time and its capacity to substantially alter things, as well as ourselves.
In the center of the gallery, right at the entrance, the installation "1600 Years of Light Field" (2019) features a platform over which an intense yellow pigment (uranium-based) extends, over which a radiation counter hangs, suspended by a cable. The color emits small amounts of radioactive vibrations picked up by the device and transformed into audible sounds through nearby speakers. The color, within 1600 years, will transform, going from the current yellow to black, but we will not be here to see the result of this transformation. While this work alludes to the monochromatic painting of Malevich and Yves Klein, on the other hand, it presents a meaning that surpasses the artistic research implemented in modernity in search of pure art. According to the collective, this work presents "a duality between the visible and the invisible, between the thinkable and the unimaginable, and about the limits of representation."There is, in the possible dialogue with art history, a fine irony that tunes the history of painting with a strategy that turns more to thinking about painting than to its realization tout court.
In an analogous work, "U-230>Pb-206" (2024), two rectangles are juxtaposed on the wall; one containing uranium mineral, the other, lead. These are two different elements separated by millions of years in terms of color convertibility. LAb[au] then declares: "the work expands the idea of monochromy to encompass the temporal dimension of color."
In "Mosaïque 8 x 8" (2020), a matrix covered with 64 black-painted aluminium plates is individually backlit with white light as they move back and forth, producing the illusion of shadow and depth. The movement of the plates is random, following a combinatorial logic. In part, this work alludes to the minimalist painting of Ad Reinhardt, for example, and in part to the kinetic art of the 1950s, with the greater challenge that, now, not all possible combinations will be visible due to the daily operating time of the gallery, the bureaucratic time. The part that is not seen but can be thought of through the understanding of the procedural logic, of how the effects are obtained from systemic programming, seeks to insert the viewer into the game, understanding them as a piece in the self-generative dynamics of automatons, but by no means as the main protagonist, like the one who, in the past, occupied the place of the king. Again, here we are invited to reflect on the finitude of human life alongside the time that things (non-human) need to complete their cycles.
"Origami Pinwheel" (2019), a kinetic relief (for the wall) triangular metal tiles expand and move (opening and closing) randomly, although they were generated from a general algorithm planned by various scripts (in which one triangle contains other identical and smaller triangles), exploring the possibilities of fractal language.
In the work "Origami Jacquards" (2019), there was the transcodification/permutation of the alphabet into binary language to program the punch cards of Jacquard weaving machines (invented in the 18th century) to make 17,268,310 possible combinations. In this way, the tapestry becomes a kind of encyclopedia (it can be read by translating the combined codes) or, as proposed by the members of LAb[au], "the fabric becomes a language pattern, expanding the notion of flag-as-symbol to encompass the idea of tapestry-as-encyclopedia." These countless combinatorial possibilities allow the creation of diverse geometric patterns, establishing yet another relationship between formal logic and written language.
In "Origami Lexicon" (2016), the starting point is the filling of a page (from white to absolute black). The evolution of this task or process creates a language pattern, also logical in terms of the gradual occupation of the page, questioning "our ability to translate creative thought into written rules, exploring the relationship between art and language." The title Origami suggests that the process is a game that follows rules that were ordered from the outside, in the way that nature operates to form its beings, whether they are aware of these processes or not.
In fact, this is a common characteristic of LAb[au]'s creations. They always place us in a position completely contrary to the humanist grandiloquence that saw man as the center of the universe and things. We are like the librarian in Borges' tale or Pascal's man: "We are nothing in relation to Everything; we are Everything in relation to Nothing; we are the middle between Everything and Nothing."
about the author
Luiz Armando Bagolin is an Associate Professor in Brazilian Art History and holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters, and Human Sciences at the University of São Paulo (FFLCH/USP). He is a Professor, researcher and art curator at the Institute of Brazilian Studies at the University of São Paulo (IEB/USP). His research focuses on Art, Art Theories, and Brazilian Art from the 19th, 20th and 21th centuries. He supervises the Graduate Program in Brazilian Studies at the Institute of Brazilian Studies (IEB/USP). He was the Director of the Mário de Andrade Library in São Paulo from 2013 to 2016. He resides in São Paulo, Brazil.
