Carla Arocha – Stéphane Schraenen

About Carla Arocha – Stéphane Schraenen

Carla Arocha (b. 1961, Caracas, Venezuela) and Stéphane Schraenen (b. 1971, Antwerp, Belgium) have been active collaborators since 2006. Their work defies traditional, academy-bound definitions of art and design and eagerly embraces uncertainty and paradox. It presents and reflects simultaneously, both consciously and not.

The inherent ambiguity in their work is entirely intentional. Few artists working today have such an unusual comfort in an art market that elevates certainty and marketability. Arocha – Schraenen challenge classification, and their work is equally at home in private and institutional collections and in public spaces, such as hotel lobbies and train stations. The work says: “Look at me; look at yourself; look at your surroundings.”

The work of Arocha – Schraenen evokes many relationships with preceding movements in art. Almost all of these associations relate to the umbrella of Modernism; it evokes the formal qualities of Minimalism as much as the illusions of Op Art. It is actually none of these. Their focus is less on objects as manifest things and more with the perception of things as objects. For example, their digitally printed photographs on mirror are simultaneously pictographic and reflective. Their installations and sculptures are flat, generally hollow, structures composed of many small components that in combination can be perceived as monumental and emphatic.

Hidden beneath the outward layers of immediate similarity is a practice that never denies it admiration for and about earlier art movements or what it has learned from them. The practice of Arocha – Schraenen remains fundamentally postmodernist. Postmodern not as a visual facsimile of the received vernacular from the 1980s, but rather in terms of the oft-misunderstood philosophies and bodies of theory accurately associated with the term. Arocha – Schraenen invite the subjective and alternative readings.

Upcoming exhibitions: