Although based on architectonical approaches, Lucas Lenglet oeuvre extends over a range of materials and media including sculpture & photography.
His site-specific project no cage presents one of the leading concerns in the work from Lucas Lenglet, staged architectural forms as point of departure for reflections. Lenglet’s interest in the architecture of safety led him to question the boundaries of safety zones, which necessary entail space-dividers like fences or walls.
His constructions let see a inevitably and clear distinction between the inside and the outside. The space is parcelled up, keeping the protected one inside. As Foucault pointed out in “Discipline and Punishment” (1975), the forms of such safety zones are the ‘petrification of unsaid social technologies of punishment’, whose architectural forms determine inhabitant’s behaviours. The safety zone becomes a prison, and the prison a safe enclave.
Lucas Lenglet transcribes his own statement on this issue by making use of birdcages. A cage is basically -spoken with the artist- ‘a combination of four fences that closes off a specific area from it’s surrounding space. It is physically inaccessible for us, but not for our gaze.
No Cage directly relates to previous works by Lenglet, among them his project Voliere for the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin (2007). In this Lenglet isolated 8 m³ of public space by installing a bright red birdcage in a neglected shrubbery next to the main square. In reference to a letter Rosa Luxemburg wrote to Sophie Liebknecht while in prison Lenglet chose seven parakeets to live in the cage for the whole summer.
By creating a beautiful frame for something – the birds in the urban green – which is always there the artist reflected on the nature of human perception. On general level he raised questions about the native and the foreign, about the exotic and the indigenous, implying political connotations about human migration and the laws applied to those seeking asylum or simply a better live.
For invaliden1, Lucas Lenglet created an environment with parts of painted wall-coverings as a hint of domesticity. Smudged domesticity it is, wiht means of abstract references to the damsk covered walls so well known from the golden age of Dutch interior painting in the 16th and 17th century that regularly displayed exotic birds among other riches. Lenglet places three birdcages with basic geometric modular forms in the gallery, confronting the canvases. The forms could be enlarged architectural models. It is an architecture for birds.
Lucas Lenglet (Leiden, 1972) is an international artist based in Amsterdam. He has had solo presentations in places such as Palais de Tokio (2007, Paris), Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 2008) or Künstlerhaus Bethanien (2006, Berlin) and he participated in group shows amongst others Why do you resist?, Pori Art Museum, (2010, Pori, FI), Neue Heimat, Berlinische Galerie (2007, Berlin) and Ideal Cities – Invisible Cities (Zamosc Poland and Potsdam).
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no cage by Lucas Lenglet
Opening Friday, 28th January // 7pm
Exhibition January 29th – March 5th 2011
www.lucaslenglet.com | http://www.invaliden1.com
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