Marcio Lana

The wild size
01.15–02.28.2004
Room 2

The work of Marcio Lana rests on processes of appropriation, deconstruction and reinterpretation. From these, he pulls a fusion of the real and the fictional, the rational and the passionate, the intellectual and the sensual.

For his first solo exhibition in Quebec, Lana presents The Wild Size, an installation marking out – with decadent humour – the distortions that occur in the processes of acquiring knowledge and interpreting a language, more specifically that of analytic philosophy. Using his passion for rock ‘n’ roll and philosophy – notably the work of the Austrian thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein — as a basis for the project, Lana elaborates a hybrid universe, both complex and completely crazy, in which he explores the possibilities of “creating representations that replace logical and rational thought with the ludic and mythological.”

Thus, in Gallery 2, the artist constructs two emblematic environments of the rock universe: a rehearsal studio and a hotel room. Using diverse objects and symbols from rock ‘n’ roll iconography, Lana drops us into a phantasmagoric delirium in which the philosopher Wittgenstein, a dominant figure in 20th century logic, finds himself given a “rocker” identity; a member of the psychedelic group The Maybers, formed by the brothers Oleg and Pancho.

A veritable visual and intellectual slide, comparable to the sonic distortions of an electric guitar being plugged into a fuzz pedal, Lana’s installation stands as a metaphor for the misinterpretation of sophisticated philosophical concepts and serves, as a result, the will to mine the barrier we erect – too often and too easily – between the logical and the intuitive.

NdeB.