Exhibition Details

Galleria Continua is pleased to host in the Arco dei Becci space in San Gimignano a solo exhibition by Argentine artist Leandro Erlich entitled 'Un volo notturno dietro una finestra murata' (translated as 'A Night Flight Behind a Walled Window').
In the critical text on the exhibition Nicolas Ballario writes: "It makes me think that Leandro Erlich has no intention of giving up the tension of flight, but at the same time wants to strip away the violence from this possibility and thus achieves the oxymoron of bringing the sky back to the realm of the earth. It is a magic that only art can accomplish, and Erlich invites us to renounce any instance of certainty."
The visual, aesthetic, and participatory devices created by Leandro Erlich always seem to place truth and reality at the extreme limit of their own ambiguous paradox but, through their dynamic and intimate formal and structural eclecticism, they find a meaning in their strongest resource: activating those new and unexpected processes connected to a different observation of habitual things or situations. This perspective refers to places, stories, memories, aspirations, desires, alternating them in a critically comprehensive rethinking of appearance. The stated intention is to allow the observer to move from contemplation to participation in a continuous interpretation of meaning.
Erlich uses certain recurring elements to construct his works. In this exhibition: a house window, the portholes of an airplane, as well as small and intangible clouds trapped in glass cases. Made by superimposing a series of glass panes, on each a digital ceramic ink print is applied, 'The Clouds' are among the artist’s most poetic and iconic works. "Those clouds in cases suggest to us that 'for a while' might be better than 'forever': clouds are indeed the opposite of human society, because unlike us, they do not seek stability, and as soon as they realize they have become recognizable, they change appearance, divide, move to become frames and boundaries. Erlich therefore shuns the idea of performance at any cost and puts under glass a symbol of contradiction and does so in an illogical and irrational manner, not giving answers but rather posing questions and instilling doubts, far from any form of certainty and authoritarianism (…)" says Nicolas Ballario.
'Night Flight' captures the view of a night landscape from the porthole of an airplane in flight. Leandro Erlich plays with the perception of things; acting on the reversal of our knowledge he teaches us to look beyond imposed perimeters as in the case of 'Blind Window', a walled window suspended in mid-air. Ballario’s text reads, "(...) closes a window, but for the first time a series of stacked bricks does not build a wall, rather it tears it down. It dismantles boundaries and widens our gaze, succeeding in the dreamlike feat of an architecture that instead of protecting exposes. It is a new conception of the world, indeed a new world reminiscent of Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, the adolescent who at the age of twelve climbs a tree determined never to come down again, and in that escape tells the world of a new possible civilization. Without superstructures, where the desire to prevaricate, to be protagonists and to perform at any cost is replaced by the desire to fly."