Artworks of Leandro Erlich #3 Neighbors & Lost Garden
2018.2.27 [Tue]
This artwork comprises two life-sized doors, on both of which is a peephole. A peephole on a door is generally something for looking at a visitor outside, but the peepholes in this artwork allow viewers to see the corridor of an apartment building and the door of a neighbor. Appearing before viewers is a space that is “impossible to exist.”
This work was Erlich’s first to deal with intimacy and alienation as its main theme, and, because the landscape is so ordinary, we cannot help but imagine our own stories and project them into it.
Neighbors
1996/2017
Metal frame, wooden door, formica, model
220 x 155 x 71 cm
Installation view: “Leandro Erlich: Seeing and Believing,” Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2017
Photo: Hasegawa Kenta
Courtesy: Art Front Gallery and Ruth Benzacar Galeria de Arte
Windows in a temporary wall in the exhibition gallery look out on a delightful display of ornamental plants. Stand by the window and spot the visitor you assumed to be beside you, looking out a window on the other side of the lush foliage of the compact garden, and yourself, looking this way from across the diagonal. In this work offering a taste of mystery via a tiny garden, mirrors lead the viewer to perceive a space that does not actually exist. That is, a garden is there that ought not to be; a garden formed by mirror images that could be likened to the Paradise of Adam and Eve - a garden lost to the physical world.
Lost Garden
2009
Metal structure, brick, window, mirror, wood, acrylic panel, fluorescent light, artificial plant
Dimensions variable
Installation view: “Leandro Erlich: Seeing and Believing,” Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2017
Photo: Hasegawa Kenta
Courtesy: Art Front Gallery and Ruth Benzacar Galeria de Arte
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