West, London
Daniel Arsham
Time Fold
PerrotinThe exhibition opens with Arsham’s eroded busts and classical figures, works that fuse the iconography of ancient sculpture with the mineral vocabulary of the natural world. In Grey Selenite Eroded Bust of Zeus, the commanding features of one of antiquity’s most powerful deities are overtaken by crystalline growth. The nearly two-metre-tall Bronze Eroded Bust of Pericles, cast in bronze and polished stainless steel and on view in the Claridge’s lobby, carries this into monumental scale. These are not objects that mourn the past but rather propose an entirely different relationship with it, one in which deep history and the present moment are understood as co-existing states. The same logic governs Arsham’s treatment of objects from popular and consumer culture, in which the detritus of twentieth-century life undergoes the same petrifying transformation. Works including Ash and Pyrite Eroded Pentax 6x7 75mm Camera and Grey Selenite Eroded Space Odyssey Movie Poster collapse the distance between the ancient world and the late twentieth century, proposing that a flat, architectural geometric forms, a compositional logic that directly anticipates the mineral intrusions of Arsham’s later three-dimensional work. Alongside these are two gouache drawings, Camera Study in Gouache and Rolleiflex Camera Study in Gouache, in which the analogue camera appears as a subject of the same careful, elegiac attention it would later receive in sculpture. Seen together, these early works confirm that Arsham’s central preoccupations were fully formed at the outset of his practice. Time Fold is not an exercise in chronology. It is an argument that past and future are not oppositional categories but coexisting states, and that every object, in Arsham’s hands, is always in the process of becoming something else.