Galeria Leme is pleased to present the British artist Henry Krokatsis in his first solo show in Brazil.
In the Project Room, Krokatsis presents a group of works that enlist and transform disregarded materials. Although materially disparate, all start, from a similar position – an act of faith in the bankrupt.
The discarded remnants of 1,999 used prayer candles, collected from churches around Sao Paulo, have been melted down and cast into a dual form of the Madonna, one upright, one inverted and fused together.
Krokatsis recognized these votive ciphers for hopes and invocations as a highly charged meeting point of the metaphysical and the material. By doubling the form, the artist creates a nervous balance between the new object’s physical presence and its former singular iconic nature.
Using mirrors found abandoned, and in local flea markets, Krokatsis has meticulously cut these to fit into each other and hung them to create a delineated surface, bringing them, awkwardly, into the realm of painting. This work could be read as a subscribing to a latter-day minimalistic /formalistic agenda. The schizophrenic aspect of this aesthetic and the material’s history, however, create a fragmented beauty, a momentarily liberating disruption.
Shown along side these are drawings made using carbon deposits from burning rags. This unpredictable technique creates ghostly, poetic evocations that seem to drift into view like photographs emerging from developing solution.
Krokatsis uses the familiar, saved from obscurity, to create something that cannot be easily familiarized. This work, in whatever form it takes, emits a low level hum of lyrical psychosis as it traverses the border between the divine and the destitute.