Chelsea, New York
Mateo López
From a Standing Position
Casey KaplanCasey Kaplan is pleased to present From a Standing Position, a project by Mateo López, in the gallery's private viewing space to coincide with the debut of Time again, a new performance by choreographer Lee Serle in collaboration with the artist, commissioned by The Trisha Brown Dance Company and staged at the Joyce Theater. These new and reimagined early works trace the circular path of personal and universal timelines, recording moments of intervention, spontaneity, and chance encounters over the last ten years of the artist's sculptural and drawing practice. In physical interactions with the viewer, the works are repositioned, reworn, and remixed, inviting us to cycle through possibilities beyond a singular fixed state and see through to alternative versions of an uncertain present. Like maps of these parallel worlds, eight new collages incorporate rotating three-dimensional elements, arrow-tipped line segments, and pages from a thrifted Greek geometry book, with each work punctuated by a short directive like "repeat," "undo," or "circle back." These phrases were plucked from conversations between López and Serle while collaborating on Time again, while their exchange of birdwatching pictures — trophies of a chance encounter — inform the works' colors. To make the dancers' costumes, the collages were digitally scanned and printed on fabric, creating wearable iterations that shapeshift onto the human figure, compelling straight lines to meander and flatness to fold. López explores modular construction with another new work, Italics (2025), where five interlocking parallelograms create a manifold of patterns with coral red triangles, simultaneously recalling the repetitions of Minimalism and the explosive paper targets of Tejo, the national sport of the artist's native Colombia. Elsewhere in earlier works like Caja de Pinturas (Feather Gray) (2019-21), López restates a treasure box of paints from childhood in the language of Donald Judd, while in Frases de cajon (Drawer) (2018), he represents the empty linguistic space of oft-repeated clichés. Hopscotching through López's oeuvre, the non-deterministic spirit of the works persists into the past, present, and future.