LIGA 15: Emilio Marín + Juan Carlos López
The Space Between Things
August – November 2014
The installation by the Chilean duo, Emilio Marín and Juan Carlos López, consists of a series of plaster objects arranged on four display cabinets distributed throughout the gallery space. The objects correspond to recent projects pursued by the studio; anonymous objects, or architectural or artistic references that have played a crucial role in the studio’s development. Works by Palladio, Ledoux, Niemeyer, Le Corbusier, Shinohara, Ito, Lewerentz, Hejduk and Rossi are juxtaposed alongside designers like Sottsass, and artists like Brancusi or Carl Andre. The objects form an active inventory, and an open-ended anthology of the studio’s interests: a frame of reference that avoids all geographic or chronological limitations, and which celebrates our actual information culture.
The materialization of these objects –through plaster castings in pale tones of grey, blue, yellow, pink and green– transforms this repertoire of references into the scale of the object, unifying their formal aspects and losing their particular qualities. Reminiscent of the nature morts of Giorgio Morandi, these objects are grouped onto white surfaces, and arranged into evocative ensembles, creating a balanced composition of eccentric figures. This small wunderkammer, installed at LIGA, presents the architect as a curator, collector and editor. Reading, observing, lending, copying, assembling and decoding the spatial proposals of today and the past are the processes which, for Marín and López, produce meaningful architecture today.
Photography: Luis Gallardo and Ana Hop