Execution at Lodos, Mexico City is obsessive and perplexing: how does it manage to be both literal and cryptic?
This is a rare painting show for Lodos, a gallery beloved locally for its cerebral and often Germanic offerings usually favouring a more conceptual, oblique approach to art production. Execution / Ejecución, by Buenos Aires-born, Berlin-based Laura Langer, is both her first show at the gallery and in Mexico, and it doesn’t stray far from Lodos’s programme.
Only five paintings hang in the tall, narrow gallery. At its centre are the works Execution I–III (2021–23), hung as a triptych of horizontal large-format canvases covering an entire wall. These are mostly white, vacuum-dotted with glued-on canvas rectangles of oil-painted remains. They are at once depictions of decayed, oxide brown human bones, and also what is left from Homesick, a show presented in 2021 at The Wig in Berlin. That show had three elements: two massive, near-identical paintings of skeletons and a lifesize cardboard labyrinth. Here, Langer has broken up the once orderly bones, cut them into pieces and put them back together; the remnants now pasted on fresh canvas are fairly unrecognisable as objects, put together like non sequiturs – a haphazard logic that soaks through the rest of the show.
On either side of Execution I–III are presented variations on a prosaic theme: Pee & Glass and Untitled (both 2023). The former is the more complex one: a clear jar half-full of yellow liquid sits atop a white radiator, next to an amber glass sphere filled with air bubbles. The latter is simple emptiness, the same partially yellow jar floating at the centre of a white canvas, slightly askew, its perspective a little wobbly. While bones and skulls can easily lead us to reflections on memento mori, what contemplation might pee in a jar provoke? What is in it for the painter herself? Experimenting with contrasting whites? Variations on golden hues? The intricacies of representing transparency? The works are at once juvenile and completely disorienting – weirdly satisfying, like the easy release they depict.
The show’s two highlights hang in odd places. Discharge Painting I (2023) is tucked in a corner, at the very back end of the gallery. This colourful abstract composition is divided horizontally into zones of lilac-white and blurry grey, overlaid with circular gestures in gold, brown, yellow, peach. The canvas was a cleaning rag for Langer, onto which she would wipe off excess oil while painting her ‘proper’ canvases.
In its humble confidence the piece is compelling, the colours working together, its performative half-doneness evocative of its process. The apex of the show (in both senses) is A Violent World (2023), a huge painting hanging above the main entrance door, facing the viewer as one walks out of the gallery. It is a closeup of a rooster, from the chest up, staring from behind chain-link fence with the voided gaze of poultry – menacing and idiotic. The fleshy red folds of his comb and wattle are lovingly rendered, his gold feathers so airy, and yet he appears humanised, able to reflect the dull powerlessness of a trapped existence. In online parlance, ‘he just like me fr’.
Langer’s work is obsessive and perplexing: how does it manage to be both literal and cryptic? What is one to do about this group of paintings? A syncopated sentence, put together out of a capricious yet cerebral attitude; an acute awareness of space, both within the paintings and, with her attentive hanging of the pieces, around them; and disparate images sharing only their self-referentiality — picture making as paint marks on a surface. What is so roiling about them? Is it a rejection of obviousness in a world that prizes relatability and easy translation? How do they puzzle so?
Execution at Lodos, Mexico City, through 27 January
