Exhibitions —

april april is pleased to present Lyndon Corners, a solo exhibition by Al Svoboda.

Models are imperfect instruments. They paraphrase, imitate, translate, and transform. They point, bend the plane. Drop the parallel postulate and the world becomes elliptical.

The model poses a question: not of space but of distance. Like all representations, complexity is transmitted through the mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy–

–something always falls out.

Since writing’s inception we have grappled with the movement between thing, thought, and model. Forseeing the limitations of their one-to-one pictographic system, the Ancient Mesopotamians created cuneiform, a new logography carved into clay tablets. The subtle implementation of metaphor, metonymy and the rebus (which Sigmund Freud placed at the crux of extracting latent content from the language of dreams) allowed for increasingly rich word significations.

Sherwin Williams’ paint color SW 6124 Cardboard posits the commonplace paper product according to verisimilitude rather than truth. Its symbolic deception hinges on the reproduction of a few constitutive rules of the material (its flat appearance and unmistakable shade of brown). While the real object is noted, knowledge of it is inconsequential.

In the context of Lyndon Corners the referent merely receives a nod. We don’t see hard masquerading as soft in Al Svoboda’s structures—they are candid, with perceptible screws and wood-grain. Exiting the realm of mimesis, the visual reduction feels more akin to the oblique transformations we find in poetry.

The artist’s self-supporting forms lay bare their own translation and transformation as a site for our curiosity. Non-concrete constitutive acts are suspended in time and tell us about themselves, a-theologically. Focus the eye and the image’s presumed absoluteness slightly ruptures: a tapering gap, an askew suture, an obtuse angle. Planks are no longer cloistered and skeletal. Pedestals re-emerge out of optical white noise and ascend the ranks of our awareness.

You never look at me from the place from which I see you.

There is a secret intensity to all objects. They require our attention. From their auratic density a field emanates–space curves, arrows magnetize, and the scopic drive directs our gaze towards a point of fascination–a locus, a place.

Outside of me the words form. A symbology insinuates itself in foreign places. Faceted curves climb the wall creating parenthetical space and imagined hierarchies. Singular suspended forms punctuate the room and fix our gaze…we fixate.

A footnote, an asterisk. Words from without.

— Izzy Powis