Michael DeLucia: Community

28 November 2008 - 23 January 2009 Cloître Saint-Merri I & II - Paris

Galerie Nathalie Obadia is very pleased to organize in Paris the second exhibition of Michael DeLucia after the one in Brussels, in early 2009, which allowed to discover this young American artist born in Rochester, New York, in 1978.

Michael DeLucia uses a corpus of ordinary objects and mass consumption that serve as raw material for his abstract sculptures. Styrofoam, supermarket shopping carts, broomsticks, and metal garbage cans are reactivated by the artist as materials that determine form. This last one is worked in the first place on computer via the computer modeling. In his work, the accent is put on a great economy of means through the materials used and through the computer medium: the parts are assembled or cut directly from the computer file with a computer-controlled milling machine.
The interest lies in what is lost and gained through this transcription and passage from virtual to reality.

"Michael DeLucia makes evident the relationship between the virtual and the heterogeneous, as "becoming other". Each of his works brings out an otherness, a metamorphosis. For example, a group of brooms becomes a flower, an explosion, a jellyfish, a battle. That diverges each time with oneself as virtuality of being and without doubt the technique of the computer and its complex programs will have pushed DeLucia in the circulations of such paradoxical images. Images that inhabit time in its entirety: deep past (but not original) and expansive future (but not utopian), all according to an intense actualization (of objects).
Excerpt from "Michael DeLucia: Virtualities of Sculpture" by Pierre Sterckx, 2009.