VOLTA: Carla Arocha & Stéphane Schraenen

The art of Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen evokes many relationships with preceding movements in art. Almost all of these associations relate to the umbrella of Modernism and the gradated ontology of its progeny later in the twentieth century; it evokes the formal qualities of Minimalism as much as the optical illusions of Op Art. And yet, it is actually neither. It is not what it is and it is not what it seems.

Their focus is less on objects as manifest things and more with the perception of things as objects. Ultimately, their installation sculptures are flat, composed of many small components but they can be perceived a monumental and emphatic. This overt presence of the formal and conceptual in Arocha-Schraenen’s work can be deceptive. Everywhere within works – whether bluntly opaque or deceptively transparent- we encounter the narrative.

Carla arocha & Stephane Schraenen, Circa Tabac, 2007, mirror and steel structure