Christian Lagata
Summer Metal is a sculptural installation that focuses its initial investigation on a number of different scenarios of late capitalism such as abandoned plots of land, the urban wasteland and the ruins of industrialisation in the countryside. These places, the result of discontinued urban development, the limits of urbanisation and the processes of agricultural modernisation, coexist under the sign of the same condition: heat and its visual manifestations. In recent years, the global rise in temperature and the increasing desertification of the planet have made this experience, historically linked to a geographical and cultural South, a less local and more universal phenomenon.
The aim of this project is to develop a series of works that emphasise the self-defining qualities that unfold around heat, with their own bodies, lifestyles, forms of work, cultural references and mythologies. It highlights the growing threat of a heat that renders life impossible and hinders the performance of any activity, as well as its intensity, which obliterates the nuances between the changing organic and the fossilised inorganic; between geological death and plant life; between the lethargic body and latent animation.
Biography
The work of Christian Lagata (Jerez de la Frontera, 1986) explores the tensions between the materiality and morphology of productive environments, such as industrial areas or urban agglomerations, and the different relationships of 'familiarity' (mnemonic, functional, aesthetic) that we establish with them. Beyond the logic of the objet trouvé, in certain aspects of these environments, Christian’s work explores the traces of their interactions (past, present or future) with human beings, rethinking their economic-social consideration of “leftovers” or “waste.”
His most important exhibitions include Donde cruzan los humos espero una semilla (I Hope for a Seed Where the Smoke Grows) - (La Casa Encendida, Madrid, 2024), Haunted I (Voloshyn Gallery, Miami, 2024), City of Palma Antoni Gelabert Prize (Casal Solleric, Palma, 2024), Fui Piedra y perdí mi centro (I Was Stone and Lost my Core) - (C3A, Cordoba, 2022), Dialect (CA2M, Móstoles, 2021), Fotonoviembre (Photo November) - (TEA, Tenerife, 2021), Entre las formas que van hacia la sierpe y las formas que buscan el cristal (Among the Forms that go Towards the Serpent and the Forms that Seek the Crystal) - (CAAC, Seville, 2020), Between Debris and Things (CCCC, Valencia, 2020), Where Water Rumble | Metalloids (Intersticio + SCAN, London, 2020), No es lo que parece (It’s Not What it Seems) - (Fabra i Coats, Barcelona, 2018) and solo exhibitions such as Ciego camina (Blind Man Walking) - (Rosenblut & Friedmann, Madrid, 2024), Una oscura euforia (A Dark Euphoria) . (Artnueve, Murcia, 2023) and Verde Chroma (Green Chrome) - (Párraga Centre, Murcia, 2019).