In her new solo show, Duplas (Pairings), the fourth exhibition to be featured at Galeria Nara Roesler in Rio de Janeiro, opening on November 29th, Lucia Koch once again proposes an interaction between architecture and color. This time, not only does she intervene on ambient light, she also presents pieces endowed with object-like character: factory-made windows and doors transformed by the use of color.
Koch uses mobile structures – sliding and pivoting – and replaces the original glass panes with filters in various colors, always in pairs, working with the notion that the minimum indivisible unit in reading colors is the pair. Some of the filter colors repeat themselves in several windows, but since they are always affected by their pairing, they are seen differently in each pair.
“These are windows through which you cannot see the outside, windows that do not connect spaces, or inside and outside. They are enclosed unto themselves and restricted to the relationships they contain. However, these relationships are not fixed, they get remade whenever we move their parts and one color inclines, covers or reveals, or slides upon another,” the artist explains.
Lucia Koch creates an intervention on the vast skylight above one of the gallery’s halls, adding a different shade of matte acrylic sheet to each of the seven panes: Semana Cinzenta (Grey Week). “These are custom-made acrylic sheets, not at all neutral shades of grey – reddish or bluish – which, when placed side by side, appear as unique colors and have their colors projected onto the wall, moving throughout the day, affected by the moods of the sky.”
This chromatic series is seen alongside the pairings installed onto doors and windows, the same type of filter at times operating directly on the architecture, and at others on portable objects. “Natural light, filtered and traversing the architecture, shares the space with more or less transparent objects lit up by lamps, a more stable, controlled light. Maybe the different natures of the elements in this set will be rendered evident; maybe they will get dissolved, contaminated by one another.”
What is at stake in Koch’s works is the transitory, fugacious character of vision in particular (and of the senses in general) as an instance that reassures onlookers of the external world. All that is left is for the observer to yield to the transitory in the contest between visual immediacy and the comprehension of what one sees.