ART-PRESENTATION: Pedro Reyes
Pedro Reyes is known for imagining solutions for a happier world. In 2008, Reyes worked with local authorities in Culiacán, Mexico to melt down guns into shovels, and then used the shovels to plant trees. In 2013, he turned 6,700 firearms confiscated by the Mexican government into mechanical musical instruments. By creating spaces to encounter, the artist produces the conditions by which to drive cultural change.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lisson Gallery Archive
Pedro Reyes pushes the boundaries of how an artist appropriates material for artistic production, his work spans many different media: sculpture, performance, video, and often participatory. Pedro Reyes for his solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in New York presents a group of new sculptures made from volcanic stone, marble and concrete, also surrounding the sculptures are 156 works on paper, installed floor-to-ceiling on the gallery walls. The sculptures resonate with both modern and ancient sources. Volcanic stone is a recurring material for the artist, and he notes both its integral role in the shaping of Mexico’s landscape and its deep connection to the diet of its inhabitants, used for millennia to grind corn in metates and molcajetes, the Mexican version of the mortar and pestle. Other works in the show range from the luminous marble of Carrara to concrete, which offers the artist new and entirely different plastic possibilities thanks to the interplay of cement and steel armatures. For the artist, it is a fluid movement between the creation of drawings and sculpture, and vice-versa, and the dizzying multitude of works on paper in this exhibition exemplify the complexity of the relationship. The 156 drawings papering the entirety of the gallery’s east and west walls, extend Reyes’s concerns with sculpture and art-making to encompass many of the radical thinkers that have informed Reyes’s practice. They feature a varied set of artistic figures. Pedro Reyes political stance, use of found materials and disavowal of the corporate mentality sets him in the wake of Arte Povera. He is perhaps best known for his projects “Palos por Pistolas” (2008) that initiated in the city of Culiacán, a city in western Mexico with a high rate of deaths by gunshot. The botanical garden of Culiacán commissioned artists to do interventions in the park and his proposal was to work in the larger scale of the city and organize a campaign for voluntary donation of weapons. Several television ads were prepared by the local TV station inviting citizens to exchange a gun and for a coupon. Those coupons could be traded in a local store in exchanges for domestic appliances and electronics. 1527 weapons were collected. These weapons were crushed by a steamroller in a public act. The pieces were then taken to a foundry and melted. The metal was sent to a major hardware factory to produce the same number 1527 shovels. These shovels have been distributed to a number of art institutions and public schools where adults and children engage in the action of planting 1527 trees. More recently with “Imagine” (2012) and “Disarm” (2013), Pedro Reyes used the remnants of 6,700 weapons that the Mexican army had collected and destroyed. Working with musicians the artist created a series of 50 musical instruments. The second series are 8 mechanical musical instruments they can be programmed and operated via computers, making them capable of performing music concerts with compositions prepared beforehand.
Info: Lisson Gallery, 504 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 28/2-15/4/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lissongallery.com
