For our second participation in Art Rotterdam, Dürst Britt & Mayhew presents a solo booth by Lennart Lahuis.
Lennart Lahuis’ main artistic concern is the suspension of visual information. His deployment of very diverse materials results in works that seem to be in a constant state of transformation and try to slow down the process of immediate access to imagery.
For his presentation at Art Rotterdam, Lahuis created a series of eight silkscreens that he subsequently burnt. The appropriated images on the silkscreens are taken from advertisements for luxury watches. By speeding up the process of deterioration Lahuis puts an emphasis on the themes of duration and consumption. The advertised eternity of these high-end watches seems to be negated by the burnt paper. In a way Lahuis seems to capture the last breath of an image and put it bluntly in front of an image-hungry audience. He considers the image as a material, as an element that has to deal with the process of time and its consequences. The image will become frail, fade away and eventually die.
This correlation between construction and deconstruction is reminiscent of Federico Fellini’s famous film 8 ½, in which an eminent director, played by Marcello Mastroianni, starts the production of his next movie while suffering from “director’s block”. The film was highly influential as it liberated subsequent filmmakers of the conventions of time, place and mode of experience that had prevailed up to the 1960s. Lahuis silkscreened and burnt two film stills as a reference to 8 ½ ’s dealing with the deconstruction of narrative and the never-ending greed for image production.
The walls of the booth at Art Rotterdam have been covered in wallpaper and show two sentences relating to transparency and the transfer of information. The words are made from glass micro beads. To be able to read the sentences the viewer has to slowly navigate around the booth in order for the reflection to hit the eye and the information to reach the brain.
