South likes: Theo Michael and Daniel Silver at OMR, Mexico City

South likes: Theo Michael and Daniel Silver at OMR, Mexico City
Theo Michael and Daniel Silver
OMR, Mexico City, Mexico
24 April – 28 June, 2014

A new two-person show of Theo Michael and Daniel Silver is now on view at the dynamic OMR gallery, which over the last thirty years has become a pioneer of Mexico City’s contemporary art scene, presenting Mexican and international artists. Both the artists recall elements, figures but mostly memories detected in prehistoric civilisations, adopting an archaeological approach and creating their personal cosmogony of contemporary times.
The first gallery space is occupied by Theo Michael’s pieces, which create an active dialogue with the spectator through the different materials, shapes and references, while the bustling display comments on post-conceptual artists’ positions. In his show, titled Reptile Dialectics, ceramics, cardboard, stone, wood, mud and polyurethane foam take the form of primitive buildings and caves. On the walls, paintings made of soil and cement remind of martian landscapes inhabited by mystical round totemic figures.
The simplicity and roughness of the materials, together with the immediacy and spontaneity of the artist’s gestures, give a childish touch and a sarcastic view, which comes with the humour of titles such as Relax It’s Just An Artwork. In the series Fuck You I’m Civilized, ten masks or helmets showing influences by different civilisation are displayed on a raised platform. These works become props of an imaginary theatrical piece that follows the history of the preceding human existence. Oscillating between divine and comical, the pieces bring us back and forth in different indeterminate physical context where, following the steps of an geological and ethnographic investigation, these fictional gods constitute the emblems of a lost legacy.
Daniel Silver’s exhibition Roundabout Mouth attempts an archaeological endeavour, this time by way of a psychoanalytic perspective. As a continuation from his latest large-scale installation Dig in London, the current show brings together sculptures and fragments from different materials and contexts, with an eye to present the evolution of sculptural forms across time, space and history. Starting from the freudian concept that the way we perceive information is through taste, the artist uses archetypes of ancient sculptures. These figures are radically transformed by the modelling of the oral cavity, which is inextricably linked to speech. The mouth as metaphor for the source of cultural symbols produces a discourse and questions the precedent artistic values: a contemporary artistic language as a research on past times and an interrogation of an ambivalent future.

Klea Charitou

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