LAST CHANCE Edgar Orlaineta: What We See of Things is the Things

A solo show for the Mexican artist whose practice focuses on hybrid sculptural forms that draw inspiration from modernism, popular culture, and specific historic moments. In particular, Orlaineta explores post-war design and architecture, generally depicting biomorphic shapes with a strong surrealist influence.

In his new body of work, Orlaineta reflects on the philosophical explorations of perception and essence, challenging traditional notions of art and the birth point of objects through a profound engagement with materiality and meaning. His exploration of objects as non-functional or decontextualised allows him to strip them down to their purest form: a thing. What is it that differentiates things from objects, or even from art? How do these things interact with their environment? Is it the environment that gives them meaning, or vice versa? At what point during the process of making something, does it actually become something?

Through his works, Edgar Orlaineta seeks to eliminate any pre- conceptualised notions of the depicted objects, reducing them to what they appear as to the naked eye: things.