photography Shira Klasmer
The work consists a collection of domestic pieces of furniture and a collection of wall-brooches, works that are unveiled move effortlessly across the boundaries of art, crafts and design, breaking free of established genres’ conventions. The artist duo’s recurring theme of deconstructing existing assumptions and challenging perceptions and expectations is fixed in the aesthetic vocabulary of the exhibition.
Masterfully appropriating the language of trompe l’oeil, atelier lachaert dhanis engage in the vernacular of discarded material, for their prototype the artist duo used scrap wood sections, debris of today’s consumer culture, and assembled these into functional assemblages. After this initial prototype in wood, the pieces were cast in bronze, and were, thus disguised, patinated to deceive the viewer and make her question her assumptions. The bronze casting of this clone of an initially worthless materiality has all of a sudden become valuable, even though it is functionally and visually indistinguishable from the wooden prototype, making the viewer question values.
This interplay between permanence and transience demands a playful participation on the viewer’s part, who is transposed between being astonished and perplexed.
The semi-precious stones mounted in silver claws that form the wild landscape of wall brooches are objects with intrinsic ornamental worth, subject to an immediate esthetical appreciation on the part of the viewer. On closer inspection they emerge as the results of a physical displacement that turned them into a commentary on the stereotypical clichés traditionally associated with jewelry. Exhibited together for the first time, these works, characterized by the primacy of their visual appeal and potent semiotic symbolism, offer a lyrical exposition of atelier lachaert dhanis’ body of work.