Leandro Erlich: “Perception is bound up with the way we acquire knowledge”

Leandro Erlich — July 2019

Leandro Erlich is an Argentine conceptual artist who has exhibited all over the world, and who now returns to Buenos Aires with his first anthological show: Liminal. In it, the curator Dan Cameron has gathered a selection of works produced across the years, from 1996 to the present.

Erlich is known for questioning what exists in order to reinterpret reality. “Perception is bound up with the way we acquire knowledge.” Some of his best-known works are proof of it: Swimming Pool (1999), Bâtiment (2004), La democracia del símbolo (2015) and Maison Fond (2015).

In Swimming Pool, the viewer becomes an actor and an interpreter of the work: while some people look at the pool from above, others can walk along the bottom without getting wet, seeing the ones above through the water, as we do when we dive. With that, Erlich introduces doubt and breaks the paradigm we had been holding. That is his aim — to help us unlearn in order to learn again, from another angle. He forces us into an exercise of estrangement from habits we are perhaps too used to. He looks to create surprise in everyday spaces that have been altered, so that we have to think things through again critically, and so understand the power of transformation. Reality is not an immutable element but something plastic and flexible. And yet we walk through the world looking for certainties; we need to establish things precisely so as to stand on firm ground. Because to move forward, we want to know what will happen when we take the step.

In 2015, Leandro wanted to play with singularity and symbolism in order to break them, and to create a second obelisk in Buenos Aires. What happened in the end was that the obelisk appeared without its tip, which then reappeared beside the MALBA museum — demythologising an icon of the city.

Architecture is the space in which we develop and in which all our experience happens. It is the stage of our lives, and yet our relationship with urban space sometimes stays in the background. We forget that it belongs to us, and that it is a reality made by people, for people.

Liminal requires the public to intervene, to interact with those everyday objects we forget; and in giving them back their function, what surfaces is solitude, vanity, memory, something surreal or perhaps Borgesian, as much as something playful. “We are born and we look at the world through our senses, and there is something about surprise that revives the play and the discovery articulated in that first contact with the work — the capacity to discover, to understand for oneself. Because the works don’t hide the magician’s trick; it is in plain sight. That produces a joy, some endorphins.”

Iskin Sisters also surprises and questions, in that its jewellery directs attention to design and function, relegating the luxury of materials to a plane that does not exist. The body becomes the space, the place to express oneself, to play. And as in architecture or in art, in jewellery too everything is a question of perspective.

Photographs of Leandro Erlich’s works are not reproduced here, as the rights belong to their photographers and to the institutions holding them. Liminal can be seen on the MALBA exhibition page.