Luffa
guadalajara90210, Guadalajara, Mexico
March 24 – April 8, 2018
Solo Exhibition
guadalajara90210 is pleased to present Luffa, Rodrigue Mouchez’s first solo exhibition in a Mexican Gallery. The exhibition, which title refers to a natural sponge used to clean our body, invites us into an environment that is at once familiar and foreign, in which traditional categories of sculpture, nature and body are collapsed. Fascinated by what seems to have disappeared but instead has migrated, the artist presents recent sculptures and installations based on on the ideas of crossing, fluidity and ephemerality and on new possible dialogue between inner fluids, domestic waters and geological landscapes. The artist transformed the exhibition space, a former flat, by installing a linoleum white flooring, commonly used by dancers in their practice studios. This specific space triggers in the visitor’s perception a certain sense of spatial awareness, as if a performatic activity were going to happen. By creating this scenic shift in the viewer’s physical presence and expectations, Mouchez focuses our attention towards the performativity of certain of his materials and to the transitory quality of the situation he stages.
Interested in the differences between conventions and rituals of different cultures, the artist created a series of small wall sculptures made with plaster and raw earth titled Gypse Riverbed that refers directly to ancient narratives linked to the afterworld. Inspired by a Mexican myth in which small red-haired dogs guide the dead on their journey to the underworld, helping them cross the mythological river of Chiconahuapan, these works are a philosophical reflection on the idea of travel and crossing, physically and metaphysically. These works poetically connects natural events such as sudden tides, drying rivers or the process of sedimentation with our own human scale, spaces and more intimate temporalities. The artist alters a prepared surface of raw earth with his own hands, creating cavities and reliefs and leaving fingerprints, traces of tips or knuckles. He then pour dyed plaster into this unique and ephemeral mold of raw earth, which will be destroyed as the work is revealed.
From the ceiling, three sculptures made with plastic nets, natural bowls and fresh hibiscus infused water are hanging from small hooks. The natural bowls filled with the infusion drip on the white flooring of the exhibition space and creates an aleatory pattern that changes color as the hibiscus infused water oxidates in time at the contact with air, opening his work to decomposition and, simultaneously, to time itself. The exhibition includes other sculptural works displaying disconnected black rubber tubing, through which water normally circulates, unplugged water pump systems or empty plastic industrial water containers. Through this web of cables and connexions the artists translates a metaphorical approach into a collage of visual elements related to the idea of flux and movement, in an organic and porous exhibition.
