Casado Santapau Gallery will participate in Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend with the exhibition of David Renggli.
September 14-17, 2023
The unanticipated conjunction of a multiplicity of various everyday materials and motifs characterize the sculptural objects and spatial installations of David Renggli. Renggli creates apparently known objects, which upon closer inspection frequently emerge to the observer as surreal, absurd grotesques because of their material composition or the combination of objects. The moment of surprise shapes the aesthetic principle which is a recurrent theme in Renggli’s work.
His practice implies unbalance, and distills the doubt surrounding the permanence of the categories and styles that usually guarantee the validity of our perceptive framework. Fashioning a world populated by fakes, reflections, illusorily unsteady shapes and ideas and then quickly retracted, over the years his art has been capturing reality by means of its stand-in and has been poeticizing the “fake”. Fake paintings, fakes sculptures, fake objects, false equations – and yet the artificial attains to something of an autonomous truth, or what could be called authenticity.
Testifying to a reality that has become to foreign to us, the work playacts, feigns naivety, to better unsettle viewers take in by the signifier´s game. The iconoclastic, provocative gesture draw from popular imagery and art history´s classical iconography with equal facility. What David Renggli´s art plays upon is the permeability and volatility of symbols and materials, which he disseminates with intuitive haphazardness like fragments of memories that superimpose and ultimately cancel each other, as soon as they come into view. Sometimes the forms are so obvious that one cannot help suspecting them of concealing a hidden meaning. But try as the view might to twist the image, to dissect it, to circle it in search of key interpretation hypotheses, very often the work offers nothing more to see than what it shows. As a worthy child of postmodernist thought, David Renggli plays with contradictions proper to representations of his time, setting up the absurd and the arbitrary as homogenizing principle.