Fallen | Iván ARGOTE (2022) | PERROTIN

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Iván
ARGOTE

Fallen, 2022

Oil on canvas

180 x 135 x 3.5 cm | 70 7/8 x 53 1/8 x 1 3/8 inch

Unique

Courtesy Perrotin

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photograph :

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The oil paintings composing the Fallen series represent familiar architectural fragments, in the throes of decay: broken obelisks, the bases of ruined statues reclaimed by nature... The fragments float, fall and spread out, sometimes creating mineral, almost lunar horizons. In this system of representation, shifts emerge between abstract painting and landscape, between surface, volume, perspective and horizon. These works, painted during Iván Argote's stay at the Villa Medici, echo his short film, Levitate, made at the same time. For this film, he had an obelisk built and wanted to place it in the Piazza del Popolo ; it broke during the intervention. More generally, Fallen is in line with the artist's deconstructionist work on the semiotics of power in the public sphere. For example, in the series Lo que Nos Sobra and Roarr, Iván Argote transforms lions’ sculptures, traditional emblems of political power, into an amorphous object by means of the striations cutting the stone. By presenting these ostentatious materializations of political power as decrepit, Iván Argote strips them of their capacity to shape subjectivities; he confronts the spectators with their ephemeral and historically contingent character. He invites us to project ourselves into a hypothetical future, more or less distant, where these monuments, and the political institutions associated with them, will crumble. 

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