ARCO, MADRID 

ARTISTE: AMALIA LAURENT

DATE : 6.03 – 10.03

For Opening as part of the Arco 2024 fair, SISSI club proposes Partitions, a solo presentation by Amalia Laurent, young artist from French emerging scene, one that combines art, research and a sensitive political base. Amalia Laurent (lives and works in Paris, FR) is a French-Indonesian artist. She graduated from the Royal College of Art (London, UK) in 2018, and received her PhD at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris, FR) in 2023.  Member of the Genthasari group, a gamelan music ensemble, and trained in the Batik technique by MasTatang, Amalia Laurent draws inspiration from her motherland to create a body of work including installations, performances, sculptures. Amalia Laurent’s work focuses on the decomposition of dye and wax in fabrics, which forms the primary structure of her installations. Allowing for the unpredictable circulation of materials, she uses this technique as a projection of a territory like the philosophy of this ancestral art. Conceived in situ, and through the use of the photography as memory, these works are personifications of the natural or architectural landscapes in which these installations are inserted. In this way, she addresses topographical, geographical and cartographic themes, both real and fantasized, and proposes an observation of the visible and the invisible, presence and absence, the real and the beyond. Exploring the relationship between sound and matter, and revealing the artist’s multidisciplinary practice, Partitions proposes a way of glimpsing the invisible, representing an architecture of sound, through plastic experimentation and abstract processes. The articulation of the works functions like a score, shaped by a large tinted batik and a series of waxed fabrics that interact like notes. The artist plays with properties of materials uses transparency and opacity, softness and rigidity, to reveal a reflexion on what can orchestrate the gaze : waxed works are sometimes strictly framed in wood, others are embedded, and still others are accompanied by silk that overflows and extends the motif like a mural sculpture. Inspired by the circular diffusion of sound and energy in the gamelan, and the Angklung, a musical instrument made of bamboo tubes, Amalia Laurent explores the relationship between architecture and processions, sound and space, the forms takenby reverberation on surfaces, like the propagation of a wave.