Conrad Shawcross: After the Explosion, Before the Collapse

The space of London’s Victoria Miro has recently been taken over by sci-fi, industrial-looking sculptures resembling large-scale mathematical models, stop motion images of explosions, scientifically crystallized chaos of tornadoes or otherwise entropic forces - a new series of sculptures by Conrad Shawcross. The geometric structures are composed from tetrahedrons, which, when used as a building block act analogically to irrational numbers, extending into infinity without repetition. While some of the structures seem impenetrable and closely weaved, others open up and expand into increasing fragmentation and disappearance, like shards and debris after an explosion. This aspect, combined with an apparent freezing of strongly dynamic forms conveys a strong feeling of temporality, an abstract narrative enveloping the whole gallery space.

Shawcross uses an array of materials, exploring their qualities, producing a sequence of aberrations, pointing to the form they all share as the essential quality. This form also acts as a type of constraint, tying them together in strict spatial patterns.

The materials used vary from mirrors – perfect, pristine and hi-tech, through industrial steel mesh parts, to metal almost completely covered by rust. This evokes a sense of decay, an additional time frame, which connects closely to the artist’s fascination with failed and rejected scientific models – one of the sculptures refers to Charles Babbage’s difference engine – a primitive computer constructed by the genius mathematician.

One of the works is animated - an origami-like mirror piece snuggled up in the corner of the gallery, like a sun in a kid’s drawing, opening up the space and challenging it simultaneously. It moves in breath-like motion, unfolding and folding back into itself, at once anthropomorphic and unsettlingly alien, post-human, mechanical, like some sort of extra-terrestrial aperture, watching and observing but not yet making a decision to reveal itself.

I’ve never seen any of Conrad Shawcross’s work. When I walked in, it struck me initially as very abstract, almost hermetic. That’s the thing with work based on mathematical principles, on proportions, patterns, internal relationships- it’s so open it sometimes seems almost empty and the viewer is left gaping in search of some interpretative key – I’m pretty sure anyone who has ever seen a perfectly, eugenically clear and abstract composition by the likes of, say, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin or even Mondrian (the Absolute’s poster boy), knows what I’m talking about. What is interesting is that the key is not always to be found in the little museum note beside the work. Sometimes the mathematical structure of the artwork will find way into our minds not through rational interpretation (through which it is constructed, most of the times) but through our pattern – loving perception, causing a sort of aesthetic pleasure or intellectual recognition, but not full engagement. The problem with Shawcross’s work, or, maybe – a problem he consciously addresses is the fact that while the models seem to have some sort of intent, a rational meaning, act like a mathematical puzzle to be waiting to be solved (I myself, after spending 15 minutes in the gallery found myself sat on the floor with my sketchbook trying to graph out the structures and break down the underlying principles needed for their construction) but their actual purpose remains thoroughly evasive, they resemble an indecipherable work of a deceased secluded scientist. What we are left with is a handful of references to philosophy, music, mathematics and science, but no other hermeneutic cues. The search for meaning in this case ends in a disenchanted realisation that it’s too ephemeral, either beyond understanding or just empty – which does not matter, because all we can experience is its unapproachability. In short, despite it being thoroughly fascinating, the only way this sort of art can be addressed is to adapt a disinterested and careful gaze of a scientist.