Art Lima

Lagos is pleased to present the work of Kristin Reger and Lourdes Martínez for ArtLima 2019.

The practice of both artists differs in approach and process, but converges in the same impossibility: to fix the identity. Currently, Martínez focuses her exploration on a specific subject, an apparently innocuous figure with whom it is also easy to relate: the duck. The anomalies that she examines operate like a puzzle, which investigates an entire map of deep search of fundamental questions about human interpersonality, considering subjective positions, relationships, geographical movements and survival strategies. Martínez's painting and sculpture function under a similar logic - striking colors, energetic brushstrokes and images that are apparently friendly and simple but that exude a certain strangeness, which points directly to meta-cultural and existential problems.

Reger addresses an indefinable identity through visceral materialities. A ghostly moment when dressing ceramic bodies in fabric molds that define her figure. The sculptures take the form of compressed folds, stumps, deep crevices, and slippery spikes. Pieces of pottery become individual entities, grouped into constellations in-situ. Reactive enamels seal each work, emphasizing its autonomy, while the pink tones suggest fabrics, flesh. Accurate and onomatopoeic titles reflect what they name: the visceral, unstable, longing. These pieces are antithetical in determining bodies - they squirt, crawl, and stalk. Reger's work stresses the strange naturalness of fragmenting and constructing the human body.

The articulations of each artist on metamorphic identities involve more specific questions - such as those on gender, race, class and nationality - but they glide over these particularities. Instead, both artists seek to expose the operative mechanisms of these constructions; Martínez through the exploration of an archetype and Reger from the abstraction of the body. In this way, the works share a meta-theoretical position based on a rare material dialogue.