Sorcha Dallas

‘A Long Chapter One’

Solo Show by Martin Soto Climent

Preview 26th February, 7-9pm

Until the 1st April

Sorcha Dallas is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in the gallery by the Mexican artist Martin Soto Climent, ‘A Long Chapter One’. This exhibition signals the beginning of a major project for the artist, to be staged across a series of international venues until mid 2011. As a result these individual projects become fragmented across time and place and work as chapters, arranged from beginning to end. For ‘A Long Chapter One’ Soto Climent presents four works that are interested in the idea of time, experience and the transformative potential of materials. The works create a shared narrative concerned with fundamental ideas of birth, death and the cyclical nature of life.

The walls in the first gallery operate as a schema for ‘The Equation of Desire’, the artist’s most ambitious work to date. Since 2001 Soto Climent has taken a selection of yearbooks from 1959-1972 which he has folded and photographed to creating new insights into the original post war source material. Each individual yearbook becomes a catalogue of a calendar year. Through re-photographing and delicately juxtaposing these images Soto Climent creates a new calendar with its own distinct rhythms and cycles, which through intimate reading creates an active reinterpretation of the past and poses questions around its place in the present. The installation creates a pattern loosely structured around the twelve calendar months, but also groups these images to play out the key stages of life.

Within the same space Soto Climent displays two sculptural works- ‘Sugar Skulls’ and ‘My Heart’. ‘Sugar Skulls’ refers directly to the famed Mexican candied skulls used within the Day of the Dead celebrations. This festival celebrates the idea of rebirth, with death not being seen as a finite end as believed in other cultures. This positive attitude to life, and the idea that physicality is only a temporary vehicle for containment, is suggested in the use of the hourglass. The hourglass concretely represents the present as being between the past and the future, making it an enduring symbol of time. By removing the sand Soto Climent seems to have suspended time itself and created an altered state where objects aren’t constrained by their own narrative and physicality. Also in the space is ‘My Heart’, a mobile sculpture made from the artist’s coathangers and a Klein bottle. The Klein bottle is a mathematical device and has a non-orientable surface with no identifiable ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ sides. Its surface has no boundary, which is created through adding a fourth dimension to a three-dimensional space. This object operates as a tool whose functionality and form ties in with the artists own conceptual ideas around space and time. By delicately suspending it against a personal memento the artist creates a constantly revolving dichotomy surrounding emotional experience over more logical interpretations of life.

In the second gallery Soto Climent exhibits a site-specific installation entitled ‘A Sweet Silly Idea’. Almost the entire floor of the gallery is covered with sugar on which sits an obsolete found globe. As with his other works Soto Climent’s performative action can be traced in the circles of sugar he has laboriously spiraled around the globe. The result is a heady transformation into an almost lunar landscape, which poses ethical and ecological questions around trade and boundaries. The act or transformation is a primary interest for the artist and one that allows alteration without destruction of the original found object. Soto Climent has a genuine respect for an object’s history coupled with an ecological desire to refrain from adding any more unwanted items to an already saturated global economy. The entire exhibition shows the effortless ability Soto Climent possesses in transforming basic materials, often personal mementos or discarded found objects, into poetic set ups. Despite their apparent simplicity the resulting sculptures are loaded with symbolic and philosophical significance.

Martin Soto Climent was born in Mexico City in 1977. Recent solo shows include ‘Laberintome’, T293, Naples; ‘Impulsive Chorus’, X initiative, New York; ‘The Intimate Revolt’, Karma International Zurich; ‘For Your Eyes Only’, La Sala, Mexico City, all 2009 and a Solo Position at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2008. Recent group shows include ‘Between Space’, P.S.1, New York; ‘Ordinary Revolutions’, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen and ‘Nudes’, Fortes Vilacla Gallery, San Paulo, Brazil. Soto Climent lives and works in Mexico City.

Please contact the gallery for further information.