Rafael Gerlach: Mirror Cabinet

For his second solo show at Galerie Chenus Longhi, Rafael Gerlach has looked to push even further the frontiers of his plastic approach which fuels on the abandoned places that have inspired and welcomed graffiti artists and urban explorers for decades. It is not surprising given the importance of the notion of ephemerality in the way urban artists conceive their artistic process. A strange poetry arises from these places out of time and space that echo the decaying beauty of their environment. A chaotic aesthetic exudes from their decrepitude -discarded objects, worn out material crumbling on the ground, the walls and ceiling.

Rafael Gerlach's pictorial approach revolves around this idea of temporal layers, feeding on stratums of material, faded colors and flourishing rust. It stands at the crossroad between the past, the present and the future in the form of additions and subtractions of layers of ma- terial. The impactful emotional language of Rafael Gerlach's abstract paintings originates in this palimpsest-like layering process. This palimpsest is like a human being, which perso- nality forged along the years through a sum of sustained experiences and memories hidden under the dust of our subconscious. Here the idea emerges —omnipresent in art history— of the canvas seen as mirror of the soul and window on the unconscious, the layers of paint being like layers of dust occulting our own reflection in the mirror. By cleaning and unveiling certain areas of the surface, we can reflect ourselves. This is what inspired the title of the exhibition: Mirror Cabinet.