Cristopher Cichocki

Saenger Galería presents Inversion by Cristopher Cichocki, curated by Michel Blancsubé. There will be live performances on January 30, February 4 and 6, at 8:30 PM.

Cristopher Cichocki's work follows in the footsteps of a certain Robert Smithson (1938-1973), a visionary artist of the second half of the 20th century, who recommended, among other things, not to hastily change the water in the vase, because under the microscope it revealed an increasingly fascinating bacteriological life as the flowers deteriorated. One of the recurring themes in Cichocki's work is water as an essential element for life, but also in the traces left by its distant presence in today's arid places. A resident of Palm Springs, his preferred areas of research are the Californian deserts, from which he collects diverse materials that he incorporates into his paintings and sculptures, not without first giving them an application of color located on the fringes of psychedelia, construction marks and the bioluminescence of the marine depths.

The relationships between aquiferous areas, industrial activity and the human species occupy a central place in the dynamics that interest Cichocki. Recall Smithson's wanderings through the industrial wastelands of Passaic, New Jersey, in the late 1960s.

They are answered today by Cichocki's trips to the shores of the Salton Sea, which Smithson was also interested in and discussed in an interview two months before his death in an accident (Entropy made visible, interview of Robert Smithson by Alison Sky, 1973).

The Colorado was regularly going off the rails, with consequences that are easy to imagine. To remedy the situation, a canal was built under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909). Poorly designed and, above all, poorly laid out, this masterpiece of civil engineering quickly became a providential drain through which the waters flowed, turning the former Lake Cahuila into an inland sea. The Salton Sea, considered the greatest ecological disaster in the state's history, is California's largest body of water, now 30 percent saltier than the Pacific Ocean and saturated with pesticides. Like Smithson in his day, it is these entropic situations caused by human activity that Cichocki points out through his works and audiovisual performances adapted to the context.

In the interview evoked above, Smithson mentioned the impossibility of swimming in the Salton Sea due to the omnipresence of barnacles on all the rocks. It is these sharp crustaceans that Cichocki uses in his paintings and in the preparations he films through a microscope.

Algae from Xochimilco, an exceptional place of biodiversity, as well as synthetic and natural microorganisms collected during the artist's stay in Mexico City, join the barnacles under the microscope. The images obtained are projected live on a large crescent-shaped screen during a series of three sound and visual performances on the gallery's rooftop. Seven luminous biomorphic paintings complete the first presentation of the artist's work in Mexico City.

Cichocki defines his work as a renewed earth art and, like the artists who, in the late sixties, found in nature a material and a place on the scale of their ambitions, he apprehends the geological present of the planet in the universe, taking into account the past without limits of time or space. His works present a reflexive game of back and forth between the micro and the macro, provoking new perceptions through fractal inversions.

–Michel Blancsubé