Gidon Sack

Infinite Regress

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Exhibition from January 19th - February 09th, 2024

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Infinite Regress

To begin, a mold produces a prototype of its own flesh. Each subsequent work made from the original is inevitably corrupted from its origin body, each iteration further removed, resulting in a series of uncannily approximate likenesses. The primary body disfigures itself to cast various mutated versions. Our hands reproduce but also disfigure.

 

The proto-motif of the reliefs in Infinite Regress is repeated throughout the exhibition, and each work bears various traces of its provenance. What occurs during repetition? Familiarity slips through the cracks. Added analog gestures on the reliefs at times obscure and at others further reveal allusions to their source material.

 

It is tempting to read Infinite Regress narratively. A series of reliefs, supposedly regressing in form. The works hint at the relation between themselves and situate a possible beginning – but ultimately, arrive at no end.

 

The proliferation of visual material is a familiar sight. We’ve collectively accessed the means of image reproduction: to infinitely replicate, transmute, disfigure, pass on. Our own images circulate through unknown hands, our own hands take and distort with little regard for source. Image reproduction becomes a shared contemporary ritual, with endless dedicated practitioners. The narrative of origin becomes forgotten and all the while, the reproduced image liberates itself from its source.

 

This hyper-sped mode of replication’s intention is no longer a likeness to the original but rather a refraction through the replicator. Repetition becomes a meaning-making practice that reflects on the image-object as well as its proliferator. Widely shared images begin to bear the traces of their circulation, taking on an archeological aura of sorts, evidence of the metaphysical hands they have passed through. Images as such can perform as objects with material marks of a past, their echoes of use transcending the two dimensional plane.

 

A relief can move readily between image an object, it extends towards us generously to permit a deeper image experience. It too, bears clues of its circumstance. Every use of a mold causes further material disintegration, imparted on to the object it creates. Aura no longer has to be lost with replication, instead, new meaning becomes embedded by its conditions of reproduction. Mimesis as creation supplants mimesis as perfection.

 

In Infinite Regress, we bear witness to a performance of repetition as an original act. Each iteration appears as a unique occurrence, each form takes from the body of origin to freely build its own. Emancipation from the mother mold. Reproduction gains a new function. Represent and re-presence.

 

Where does this leave us?

Not without an end, but rather an endlessness. A regress with no desire for restoration.

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Text by Luzie Naters

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Gidon Sack’s paintings are expansive and speculative zones, where facts and fictions converge.

 

Often responding to the phenomena of delirium, ecstasy and hysteria, his practice dissects aspects of mass psychology and the sociology of rituals which dictate our daily lives.

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