ARIEL HASSAN - ARCHIVES

Precursors of these forms have been sitting in the studio for over 3 years. They started as automatic amorphous connections of bent mesh with which I wanted to transpose the method of painting into objects. These senseless forms sat in a corner, they where not planned and I overlooked them. The process of assimilation is sometimes slow for some of the things that happen in the studio. However they where still formally quite appealing in their fearless deformity. I recently turned to these shapes thinking that they where suggestive of pillars that could support the beginning of a new world, that rise ironically, out of the collapse of our contemporary folly; all the residue of the world, physical or of thought, could be accumulated here. I took them back and made some more. There was a conceptual relationship to recent scientific experiments for the recycling of human waste matter back into comestibles. In these experiments excrement is feed to coprophagous worms that eliminate the bacteria leaving the protein behind to be re-used.
Like large accumulations of waste, this first group of building-like pillars become the nests for worms to live and feed. These phallic towers –to which holes where added to indicate the network of passages inside– can be read as self contained, auto-sexual organism; an autopoiesis occurs, transforming what was wasted into a new consumable, rising violently and clumsily from our ruins and imperfections, building a new invisible world from within.
At the same time they reminded me of lava pillars, casts of burned trees that are left after explosive volcanic eruptions destroy everything on their way. The agglomerated matter stand now hollow, as the protective armour of the spirit of what was there and of what is to come.
The wasted and nonsensical is the fundamental conception of our actions in the understanding of our world, and the unresolved conclusion is the experience. The pillars perform as a paradox, a visual mimesis of a reality used as a figure of speech for a moment of synthesis and recurrence of what has been lost - a construction that arises from an act of destruction or decomposition, that proposes that even after everything has been destroyed, based on an eternal and unchanging truth, everything will start again