Kerbside construction waste skips are transfigured as domestic fruit bowls in Magali Reus’ photographic series ‘Landings’. Pertly animated fruit and sliced cabbage slivers graze among heaped rubble, plaster dust, exhausted paint tubs, scraps of peeled wallpaper and splintered floorboards. Not some chance apparition of a discarded lunchtime kebab, this vegetal script, between semantic meaning and ornament, spells out the months of the Gregorian calendar.
These photographic prints are mounted onto steel panels bearing cropped and desaturated images of one of Reus’ childhood paintings, depicting a self portrait of the artist in arcadia. Sculptural powder-coated trays, accessorised with physical tags of the construction skip – welded hooks and tabs, custom swatches of ripped tarpaulin, wire and electric cable – enclose these idylls. On the frames’ outside surfaces, welded debossed script indicates elliptical abbreviations of months, seasons and crop air mileage.
Tape measures, like calendars, index scales. Atop a low rectangular plinth in the gallery’s centre tape measures are quizzical, proud or reclining like some art historical nude. Freed of universal legends, their skins, covered in a partly legible numerical display, conjure up an elastic sliding scale, counting, accumulating and moving forward, as their lengths trail propulsively and rhythmically. These flexing tape-measure bodies, constructed in welded and heat-forged steel, mingle with produce sacks and distressed flower cartons in a series of three sculptural assemblages titled ‘What Grows’.
Carved hunks of sand, the produce sacks’ skins delineate graphics of food-like substances such as milk substitute, cheese powder and artificial sweetener. Like ‘Landings’, these sacks know numbers – dates of social significance, expiration dates, dinner dates, and speculative codes of approved food additives.
The alchemical materials of these edible food-like substances, like sand, are elemental building blocks that might be synthetised to construct things greater than the sum of their parts. Sand into glass; powder into cheese. Sand as a construction material is formed into many shapes through elemental processes; edibles destined for consumption anticipate similar transformations: they, in turn, articulate the architecture of the domestic, the meal and, finally, the body.
A synthesised slice of nature is relayed in the larger-than-life flatlay of domestic flowers atop powder-coated aluminium boxes that mimic distressed cardboard. Daffodil, tulip and magnolia, deconstructed components of another still life, eagerly await assembly.
In the Annexe Room, the antique Victorian breadboard meets the industrial hose reel. Hand-carved in wood, scaled to the size of a dining table, this homespun object might, possibly, host a convivial group of reoriented diners. If the loaf is a staple of the global diet, it might also, in the gestures of sharing, carving, slicing, or dividing constitute an ur-choreography of sculptural gestures. Where the rebellious tape measures eschew standards, the spooling hose, custom weaved, is a rotary relief, a spiraling vortex. Follow the vortex: at the end, a limp rooster’s head hangs. As the rooster signals the dawn of a new day, so the hose plugs into a pressurised and precious resource. Water is the elemental binding agent by which bread rises and thus each day begins again.
– Jonathan P. Watts
Magali Reus (1981, The Hague) lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include: A Sentence in Soil at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; And Orchard at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; Shadow Tonics at Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam (all 2022); As mist, description, South London Gallery, London (2018); Hot Cottons, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (2017); Night Plants, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen (2017); Mustard, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016); Quarters, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2016); Spring for a Ground, SculptureCenter, New York; Particle of Inch, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield; Halted Paves, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (all 2015). Forthcoming exhibitions include: On Like Scenery at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle; Centre d’art contemporain, Synagogue de Delme and Museum Kurhaus Kleve.
Magali Reus was shortlisted for the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture in 2018 and in 2015 was awarded The Prix de Rome.
Reus’ works are included in the collections of Tate, Stedelijk Museum, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Rubell Family Collection, Arts Council Collection, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, CCS Bard/Hassel Collection, Lafayette Anticipation – Fonds de Familee Moulin, Frac Grand Large – Hauts-de-France, Kunstmuseum St Gallen, and Centraal Museum Utrecht.
Conversation between Jonathan P. Watts and Magali Reus
Jonathan P. Watts: I’d like to begin by considering ‘X I I’ at The Approach in relation to another current exhibition of yours at Nasher Sculpture Centre, Texas, titled ‘A Sentence in Soil’. The latter features the ‘Clay’ series, wall-based welded, powder-coated steel and aluminum renderings of compost products such as ‘Chicken Manure’, ‘Fill Dirt’, and ‘Steer Manure Blend’. The graphics of these are more proximate to actual market products than the blank products rendered in sand of the installation What Grows at The Approach. What is their relationship?
Magali Reus: Well, in the ‘Clay’ series I was drawn to the manure packaging: the simplicity and directness of its communication. There are no mystifications about its contents, not much dressing up or fancifying as a commodity. ‘Chicken Manure’, ‘Fill Dirt’, ‘Steer Manure Blend’ – none are particularly glamorous or appealing. I was also fascinated by the thought of using chicken manure to grow vegetables for consumption. How often do we think about the soil – the manure – in which our vegetables are grown? Imagine for a moment a bell pepper or brassica grown in chicken manure! The bluntness of its graphic communication is acceptable as a back door to a messy, largely unrevealed or known space to the consumer – namely the agricultural space where the things we eat are being produced.
In What Grows the bags approximate the size of concrete or potato sacks. Their skins feature contemporary food packaging graphics with calendar dates protruding out of the surface. These are dates suggestive of food preservation and expiration, as well as memorable dates of future and past communal activities likely gathered around food. The graphics found on the skins of the bags are of processed or ‘substitutional’ foods: a soft cheese rendered as powder, a liquid milk substitute. They are part of the make-up of our contemporary foodstuffs where innovative processes allow familiar natural products to slip into unconventional shapes. Manure is base, but sand as a material is grounding and also the most base component for a range of construction materials. It continues to be synthesised into innovative technical processes, let alone widely-used ancient mixes, and into many material configurations: concrete, brick, glass, and other synthetic compounds.
I am interested in the transformations that, say, manure enacts or sand undergoes – their propensities. It’s alchemy. Where sand is conjured into many shapes through alchemical processes, a like trajectory awaits edible ingredients destined for consumption. These edibles maneuver the digestive tract but only after they’ve been transformed into the allure of a meal. The architecture of the domestic, the meal and lastly the body: they’re all containers encapsulating metabolic processes that find themselves in continuous flux.
Returning to the sand, I was fascinated by the way the bags’ surfaces might be the same finish as their material substrate. Cut one through and it’s the same all the way. Whereas normally a weave, a plastic or a paper skin reassuringly holds the content, these bags’ skins and the material goods they purport to hold are deceivingly one and the same.
JPW: This recalls the Robert Hass poem you shared with me titled Praise, which I know you briefly toyed with including in the press release:
The insides of peaches
are the color of sunrise
The outside of plums
are the color of dusk
In the summer
peaches the color of sunrise
In the fall
plums the color of dusk
MR: Beautiful isn’t it? The fruit interiors, surfaces and external seasonal environments are captured at once by Hass with profound simplicity and mystery.
JPW: Like the sand bags in What Grows, numerical codes – debossed, welded – appear in the ‘Landings’ series, specifically around the edges of the frames. Are these also food preservation dates?
MR: No, not quite. These are abbreviations of months, seasons and crop air mileage. We could think of them as a kind of abstract legend. In cartography the legend features titles, symbols, clues to orientation, scale and so on. Numbers appear across the works in ‘X I I’ – of course, the title itself is an allusion to the Gregorian calendar that structures, among other things, the agricultural year. Those awry tape measures in What Grows have no regard for standardised rule: they’re upscaled, covered in a part-legible numerical display that suggests an ambiguous sliding scale. It is a scale, that is a counting and moving forward, as their lengths trail propulsively and rhythmically.
Neatly tucked behind a protective pocket-sized plastic compartment, the tape measure usually finds itself tightly wound around a reel, primed to oblige – ready to spring into action. These uprooted, metal shapes conversely look indicative of an active life. The tightly wound form rhymes with another tightly-wound form in the exhibition, Our Volumes.
JPW: Before we talk about Our Volumes I’d like to continue with numbers and scripts. ‘X I I’ also appears, formed by cabbage, in one of the ‘Landings’ photographs. Who knew cabbage could produce such a beautifully baroque script? Why cabbage? Perhaps you could also tell me a bit more about the settings of these texts.
MR: ‘Landings’ is a meditation on the human-directed selective manipulation of crops for particular traits. Not displayed in the common domestic fruit bowl, the exotic fruits and cabbage portrayed in these photographs find themselves positioned in a new surreal stage, documented among the debris of construction skips throughout the city. Shot in macro detail, the fruits are character portraits of sorts, that find themselves – sometimes exuberant, other times shy – posing among debris stripped from renovated homes.
As with the ‘Clay’ series, I was interested in the constructed image of nature, in this case the fruit bowl within our domestic spaces of consumption. Fruit, pictured in ‘Landings’, is structured by global logistics networks of commerce: agricultural, geographical and financial markets are all integral (invisible) markers to the existence of a single piece of fruit in the transactional space of the supermarket. I think of these photo works as still lives of sorts: we could think of the skip as the vessel, acting as an oversized fruit bowl.
JPW: And the cabbage?
MR: Seasonality, change and reproduction are introduced to the series by photographs of sliced red cabbage. In European folklore babies are born among the cabbages; here, purple slivers arranged in a kind of near-asemic writing spell out twelve months of the calendar. The writings are so baroque, as you put it, they’re near-inscrutable, the cabbage slivers flicker among the debris between semantic meaning and pure image.
JPW: In addition to numbers, I couldn’t help but also notice various tags and hooks, as if quoting the skip, attached to the steel frame.
MR: Yes. The photographs are set into steel trays and mounted onto a ground of lightly faded beige hues, as though, perhaps, the remainder of tile adhesive on a board rescued from the skip. These are actually cropped sections of a childhood self-portrait. I’m pictured as the protagonist within a simplified symmetrically balanced rendering of a pastoral environment: a single cloud and flower on either side of me, a sun directly overhead. As you mentioned, the steel frames containing these panels are accessorised with physical tags often found around the construction skip, such as welded hooks and tabs. Custom swatches of ripped tarpaulin, wire and electric cable point to the wider use and environment of the construction skips. Set within these constructed bespoke sculptural frames, the photographs become volumetric, extending and repositioning their flatness in physical space.
JPW: Let’s return – spring back – to Our Volumes. I find this a strange and unsettling work because of, I think, the perfect collision and confounding of objects, usage and affects. There is, as you’ve alluded, the tight coil of the industrial hose reel. Its face is modeled after a Victorian breadboard which, by being upscaled and reoriented, approaches the domestic tabletop, yet practical use is denied. By dressing a plastic spray head with a red wattle and comb I recognise a rooster’s head. Limply hanging, the rooster, we might infer, has been slaughtered. Vital water hangs with non-human animal death.
MR: There are many ways this work speaks to ideas, objects, concepts, tones, affects in other works. For example, the coiled hose, constructed in custom weave fabric, wrapped around its wooden spool, might unravel in a rotary movement, suggestive of a clockwise movement of time. At the coil’s end (or start, depending on how you approach it), the spray head, cast in aluminum with details in rubber, doubles uncannily as a rooster’s head. The rooster signals dawn breaking in the morning; its call cuts through the environment and has deep social meaning, predating the mechanical clock. Here, attached to the hose, it is an active agent encouraging uncoiling. Perhaps it is slaughtered? This slaughtered rooster is connected by the hose to a larger network: a weave, a water system, a digital and / or virtual web.
Larger than life, the bread board is rendered at approximately four times its size. It’s more in line with the size of a dinner table that might host more than one person in the social act of consumption. Like sand, or manure, I think of bread as a ‘building block’ or ‘brick’ of the western table. Consuming bread as a nutritional element is millennia old and happens throughout the day in the western world: breakfast, lunch and dinner. The sharing of a loaf requires it to be carved, sliced, sculpted, broken or divided into smaller rations partitions. I was thinking a lot about these actions as sculptural gestures.
JPW: I’ve been thinking about the way organic matter enters the work. It’s everywhere, but we don’t smell it. No composting. It’s actually not base. The works are primed, anti-organic, even, in their structure.
MR: The organic is present in the works in terms of the image of the organic or at least imagery we associate as such: our foods, materials such as soil and sand, flowers and plants, animals. I think what the work is suggesting is that all of these, in fact, are in one way or another synthesised constructs that are in reality quite far-removed from being natural. We’ve managed to manipulate and tame them in such a way that they’ve transformed and become totally other – a vague ghost – or rather a drag version of their former selves. I am often surprised to see a turquoise and pink peonie, covered with glitter, as though it’s wearing a ballroom dress, its skin in pancake make-up ready for its party date, patiently waiting in a floral shop water bucket, to be purchased and displayed in someone’s home in full glory.
JPW: After The Approach show these works travel to Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Belgium, for your solo exhibition ‘On Like Scenery’, opening at the end of October. You’ll also show a series of new sculptures there titled Candlesticks. With these works you seem to be concerned with light as an energy source. I understand that for this show you have responded to the museum’s rural setting. They’ve also allowed you to access and display objects from the collection.
MR: Candlesticks consists of towering streetlamps, powder-coated in a stately, earthy green. A series of object substitutions, barely perceptible at first, destabilise this quotidian piece of urban lighting. Where a typical lamppost houses an illuminated lantern at its top, the capitals of these posts are open and oversized incandescent light bulbs. And where a typical incandescent bulb holds an electrified filament, here the curlicues of bent metal instead form cursive words, each spelling out a different type of electrical illumination. ‘Halogen’, ‘fluorescent’, and ‘LED’ slide in and out of legibility as the viewer’s perspective shifts around the works.
A different script adorns the long poles holding these bulbs: numbers inscribed in the surface in hand-carved markings. Echoing lovers’ carvings in the bark of trees, the romance of these inscriptions is in tension with quantitative measurements of agribusiness – sunlight hours for crop growing, average crop weight and sizes. Below these markings, within the base of the lampposts, a cross-sectioned opening reveals an oversized fruit or vegetable in 3D-printed resin and plaster, sitting as if incubating in some futuristic growth chamber. In one, a scaled-up raspberry postures on an oversized picnic plate; in another is an ear of corn. Part sanded white plaster and colorfully painted surface, the finish lends the produce the quality of a prototype, a product in development. In these works I was thinking about metabolism, energy, the passage of time, and the coursing lines of power that bring sustenance from the sun to our homes and our dinner tables.
Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens houses the collection of its founders, Jules and Irma, in an extraordinary modernist structure by the architect Erik van Biervliet. Completed in 1968, the building is designed as a device to scoop and intensify the weather and rural environment. I’m also aware that this surrounding region houses magnates of industrial food production. As for the collection, they’ve given me full access which is really exciting. I plan to display a James Ensor upside-down set into a wooden cable reel!