Born in Peru, Lizi Sanchez completed her MFA in Fine art at Goldsmiths, London, in 2007, whilst there winning the Red Mansion Art Prize, resulting in a residency in Beijing. Her collages and sculptures are both frivolous and serious, questioning our perceptions and values.
Lizi Sánchez explores, in her sculptural work, the chances and variations of modular-components assemblage following their own integrated logic of functionality, yet producing furniture-like objects that allegorically abridge the notion of structure for the sake of it. But the ciphered rationality behind the very materials that constitute the work turns overlaid by the undergrowth of a number of signs of conspicuousness.
In spite of the very industrial provenance of the material, the artist undermines its practical “nature” with her labour. She treats it as raw matter, transforming it as if it claimed domestication, purposely skipping the fact —perhaps abounding on it— that the medium is already a proof of domain of the mass-produced. By using the traditional procedures of craft making (e.g. modelling, polishing, knitting, folding) and doubling an appearance, an artifice already existing in the material, the simplifying device becomes deactivated, attempting to recover a state of pure aesthetic acknowledgement.
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In her former work the arrange of elements emphasized in a dispute for verticality and hierarchy, among a number of despair structures, reflective boards and iridescent clusters of spheres and ties, which strongly evoked a festive mood of unchained commemoration: a sculpted fanfare. “Enhancement” seemed to be the motto driving them. Her current sculptures show a more discrete fight between structure and ornament yet unresolved —none of both becomes victorious. What we see is the lasting tension between a rigorous disposition of a travestied surface. Sánchez sculptures seem to be appliances that resist being an object and recall a latent subjectification. As if the shrillness were a claim of will and resistance to usefulness.
Her collage works take a more analytic stance. With a surgical eye, she detaches fragments of images in magazines’ publicity. Some of her compositions clearly resemble
Malevitch’s Suprematist works. However the chromatic fields are occupied in Sánchez —again— by layered layers (also involving the layer of the photographic representation): glosses, effects of transparency, reflections, streaks, pleats, and every trace of exuberance.
The surface effects index what was depicted in the source photographs: fabrics, packages, crystals, yet slightly obliterated by the deconstructive gesture, as if the objects “aura” granted by wrap could be poured off and converted into a pure sign. The arrangement of elements also reminds Fischli & Weiss’s unstable compositions of precarious equilibrium.
These geometrically regrouped elements could also been linked with the paths and stages in the “Snakes and Ladders” match. In it, departure and arrival points become relative, and the game a pure detour amidst risk and aspiration.
Lizi Sánchez inquires on the art and artists’ role in an over-designed and compulsively gadget-driven world. She elicits the tension —compelled by a de-ideologized system of efficiency and production— of being in between fast-track producers of temporary idiosyncratic images or engineered decoration.
Carmen Cebreros Urzaiz
April 2010
