• Mandla Reuter

The artist’s work is based on the creation of environments obtained by playing with changes of space. Mandla Reuter reworks the usual relations with a given place turning them into protagonists of the artist’s work. The traditional distinction between single works and installations gives way so that the two levels constitute a defined situation and thus everything that the artist inserts in the environment contributes toward altering the interpretation of that place.

In the first room the large black monochromes reflect the space that surrounds them alternating a degree zero of the image and the overabundance of information, thus opening the gaze to infinite interpretations. Their vision is contrasted with and fragmented by the views of the Los Angeles horizon which are characterized geographically and temporally and which represent a kind of work in progress, the conceptual heart of a project that will be developed in 2011.

A door opens a crack from in it’s possible to glimpse the spaces of the second room, otherwise inaccessible. The installation takes the form of a diorama made of sounds, lights and colors where the sound of the Niagara Falls, which we could define as white noise, echo in the room thus consolidating the link between the two exhibition spaces. Once again we find the contrast between the concrete and the abstract: from one side a defined space and sound that leads to a specific place, from the other side the lights which together produce a range of millions of colors.

The work of Mandla Reuter invites us to make use of the so-called “suspension of disbelief,” an expression coined by the English poet, literary critic and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the XIV of the Biographia Literaria: “…in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”