LMYLB

Nora Fisch Gallery | 2011 - Tigre Museum | 2012

On the LMYLB exhibition, at the Nora Fisch Gallery, the artists display works on paper regarding a famous piece of our literature.

Like classic detective novels, in which the mystery is confined to a sealed room and all the keys and answers to discover the truth can be found inside that microcosm, the LMYLB exhibit, which brings the artists Leandro Katz and Leonel Luna together, reduces itself to a limited space. The walls of the rectangular room of the Nora Fisch Gallery are taken by the artists to draw multiple conjectures, clues and inquiries around a classic story of our literature, where the visitor can decode them from pieces that pick up traces from the complex Borgean universe.

When entering the room, on one of the walls, 18 small works by Luna compel the viewer to approach in order to read words that unfold through ink-traced paths over cut-up papers: entangled labyrinths which connect terms that start making sense as they relate, like parts of small family trees. On the opposite wall, Katz’s delicate works, also on paper, appear swarming with symbols, phrases, texts, questions, signs and intertextualities, producing a similar effect of inevitable attraction and impulse to search.

This is because - behind the apparent simplicity and sobriety of the two approaches, connected by a story - several themes entwine suggesting different topics, sparking endless interpretations. The viewer becomes a detective in order to unravel every single little labyrinth that constitute the work that these two artists –as “pure reasoning” investigators- specially thought through for this exhibition.

LMYLB is the title of this show that, from the beginning, confronts the viewer with the idea of an enigma and invites them to find out from a mysterious name what the theme is which connects these two artists of extensive background in a joint exhibit. It’s the initials of the famous detective story by Borges, “La Muerte Y La Brújula”, which condenses elements of Greek knowledge, Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, numerology and math. Using the story as a starting point, the artists worked separately, so that the pieces were “not the result of a direct collaboration through the working process, but the outcome of the joyful meeting between two minds that go through attuned thought processes and refresh themselves in conversation with each other”, as explained in the brochure’s text.

For Lönnrot, the detective who is the lead character in Borges’ story, reality can disregard the obligation to be “interesting”, but that’s not the case with “the hypothesis”. Following that line of thought, many conjectures and “interesting hypothesis” coexist in this exhibition, the ones traced by the artists themselves through words, rhombs, harlequins, maps, compasses and diverse elements which arise from the intricate path that Borges sketches in his story.

Is a compass enough to orient oneself? If the very essence of a labyrinth is to confine to the smallest possible place the most complex tangle of trails in order to delay the traveler’s arrival to the centre or the exit they wish to reach, this instrument will end up being useless or fatal. But, who can resist a labyrinth?

Graciela Lehmann