artnexus #124

Throughout his extensive career, Leandro Erlich [Buenos Aires, 1973] has shown a marked interest in visual ambiguities that motivate us to question our habitual ways of perceiving. In other words, his installations invite the spectators to examine an unmoored certainty that challenges our traditional conceptions of what is real.

The artist explains that one of his main interests “is to question the nature of our understanding of reality.” Buoyed by architectural references—such as the one on our cover page—his constructions call into question what are usually considered to be the perceptual structures regulating what we see. Erlich summons us to be surprised by the optical constructions that his mind unearths in his everyday observations. In 2015 [when it was installed for the first time], Pulled by the Roots, a huge construction crane lifted an entire house mid-air over the marketplace in Karlsruhe, Germany, with roots dangling from beneath it. The house as an urban place of habitation is, at the same time, strongly linked to nature. City dwellers cannot separate themselves from nature nor can they ignore the relations between nature and living beings.

Erlich does not experiment only with perceptions of the real. As a conceptual artist, he seeks to express himself through ideas, fictions, and ambiguities. His work reveals a concern with aspects of a social breadth. Touching on topics such as globalization, time, global warming, or the prevailing tendency to homogenize forms in the urban space, his installations challenge what we usually think we know. And the everyday becomes the dimension that lets us perceive how supposed reality can be altered, nurturing a diversity of interpretations that question tradition.

In an interview conducted by The Objective on June 13, 2020, Erlich argued that “the universe of things with which we coexist” is built on the relations between reality and perception. In other words, we establish the link with what surrounds us through perception as a tool with which we can relate and learn. Contemporary art, conceived through conceptualism, allows the use of a variety of alternatives to create illusions that operate on the viewers to “generate a mystery that invites to be deciphered.” On the other hand, “a process of rational intelligence allows us to observe things all over again in order to awaken our critical senses.”

IVONNE PINI