Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez

Carl Freedman Gallery is pleased to present Werkstatt des Albhabets, Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez’s second show at the gallery.

Net bags which once held fruit and vegetables are trapped between rectangles of black nylon mesh. Now deflated, limp almost, they carry the memory of a fuller life. Woven from coloured string, and forming simple, soft organic shapes, they are reminiscent of mid-20th century craftwork, though Miró and Arp also come to mind. The dodecahedron has held a certain fascination for both the ancients and the writers of the future. Here the rational order of the geometric constellation is offset by aleatory nature of the net forms. There is sense of frozen animation – a moment of multi dimensional semaphore.

Printed paper fruit stickers with logos have endearing, mostly nostalgic kind of designs. They carry a code, speak of other places. In Perambulation of the Parish (2008) they are sporadically   arranged, making a random map of their original locations. Seen through burn marks in the fine copper screen they could be the cause – rotting the material. The underlying mirror reflects back a slightly smaller grid, enough to create interference, a distraction pulling you in closer to the point where it stops and the constituent parts are stabilised.

There is a certain type of methodology and approach to materials in this work that could be called acts of salvage. This is most clearly in evidence in the sculptures True Servants (2008). Fragments, shards, off cuts, error printings – these really are the materials on the periphery, things that have true marginal value. The cast concrete architectural elements, simple in construction, carry an echo of Modernism, something perceptible throughout Echeverri’s work.

It is work grounded in an intuitive method of collaging, with an ordering that is contingent rather than absolute, provisional rather than fixed. Individual components fit together through an assemblage technique that allows the parts to often interlock literally and organically to create the form. Structure, composition, color, line, plane, shape, and surface are all at times at the point of dissolution. But there is precision there too, and an inner order and resolution beyond the seemingly happenstance and inchoate.

Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez was born in Costa Rica (1974). Subsequently she lived in Colombia and then Germany, taking her BA at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Art. Following her BA in Düsseldorf, she moved to London to study at RCA, graduating from the MA sculpture course in 2005. She currently lives and works in London.