Ricci Albenda

Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
Through 3 March

Ricci Albenda is a multifaceted artist. Exploring a variety of media—painting, sculpture, environmental installations, and architecture—the artist also harbors a passion for cybernetics. His work focuses on space and, in particular, the relationships between space and people, to propose a reconsideration of its three-dimensional properties. Using a new geometric shape called a Tesseract, Albenda attempts to create the illusion of a “fourth dimension.”

The Tesseract is not real, however, it exists only in our minds. The artist recreates those parts of Tesseract that the human eye can perceive in the exhibition space with large, white-painted, fiberglass panels. These are affixed to the walls in such as way as to blend into them, yet the walls are nonetheless altered. First, because their planes of intersection are no longer perpendicular—and so no longer form a cube—but give the impression of being seen in perspective. Second, some of these panels, which the artist defines Portals, create a surface of niches and reliefs that recall the facets of diamonds.

These convex and concave forms complement each other and, for Albenda, these Portals represent the same object observed from multiple viewpoints. Traces of an essential minimalism lend the work a certain elegance and the organic nature of the forms seduces the observer. It would seem that in this installation Albenda is seeking to express the need for an alternative architectural environment to that which the gallery space itself provides; a space that involves the visitor in an innovative, but not disorienting, sensory experience. The alternation of full shapes with voids, the different dimensions of the various parts, the distortion of walls and portals, all serve to create an optical illusion that allows a different perception of the exhibition space.

At the center of the gallery, redefined by these new coordinates, hangs a quadrilateral form that creates a passage around itself, a physical and virtual corridor between the two cubes: the one suspended from above and the one that is the exhibition space itself. Visitors are thus obliged to move through a sort of labyrinth—reminiscent of the digitally created mazes found in videogames—and hesitate before turning a corner, wondering of what strange reality lies in wait for them.




Micaela Giovannotti
Translation by Rosalind Furness