Christian Lagata / Big Snake, Little Snake, Prey
Curated by Roxana Gazdzinski and Joaquín Jesús Sánchez
4 December 2020 - 9 May, 2021
Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo
Calle Américo Vespucio, 2
41092 Seville, Spain
Big Snake Little Snake, Prey is an installation comprising several steel sculptures, cement casts of pipes, latex pieces covered with rust and residue, tiles and a central elevated piece with its own lighting.
The vertical structures recall totem figures, but certain elements, such as their use of modular structures, are also associated with 20th-century sculpture. Despite the unpolished welding and sharp edges, the works do not seem cold, perhaps because those imperfections can be interpreted by viewers as signs of vulnerability. To a large extent, Lagata’s work establishes an ongoing dialogue between the supposed roughness of the materials he works with and our undeniable familiarity with them. In that sense, his production offers us a “human scale”, proportions and vestiges of the past actions of men and women like us.
The installation presents a purely formal aspect of intersecting vertical and horizontal planes, inviting us to read them from top to bottom and left to right. However, it also posits reflections on the construction of the modern and contemporary city and how the pre-established places we now inhabit mould our lives. The city is not a novel theme in the arts. From 19th-century flânerie to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, the urban world has been the subject of many contemporary musings. After all, our ecosystem is no longer hills and valleys but asphalt and concrete.