Jonathan Binet
They are moments of a former past. Subtle yet straightforward acts, indicating an array of impulses. Above all, the sculptural gestures seem to long for the endlessness that may rest within the possibility of their abstract nature. For if the void was ever capable of tenderness, it resided right within here — its freedom of ever-reaching meaning.
Jonathan Binet’s second solo show at the gallery assumes the artist’s traditional questions about spatial agreementwithin and outside the reflection of drawing; how the line declares boundaries while simultaneously portraying thevisible proof of existent, separate worlds. The audience is confronted with the familiarity of the frame — sometimesentirely acknowledged; other times mere fragmented hints become the objective. Whatever the physical outcome,each decided space automatically warrants a pause in everyone that comes face to face with it.
It is this very pause taking place inside Binet’s sculpturally-defined scenes that stretches and adjusts itselfaccordingly to every incoming gaze. Determined by a series of shifting yet interrelated contours of metal and wood, the pause now and here does not belong to any previously agreed introduction. Rather, it serves as an invitation to contemplate the various discourses that instinctively are experienced by being introduced to these framed, materialsilences. What happens when we come across a space that lasts as long as human imagination? Does all possible life solely materialize inside the delineated arrangement? Or can it also move beyond its setting, outside the self?
Standing in front of Binet’s raw frameworks, we are given a momentary aperture to time and space that lead toquestions and answers entirely up to our own. And this might be Binet’s greatest offering — he is not only asking us to temporarily postpone our inevitable future in an ever-accelerated society, but proposes an inexplicable retreat where we become hostage to our individual thought process.
For a while we decide to stay here, trying to encounter meaning inside the unknown that gently unfolds ahead of us — organically determined and full of possibility. Everything we imagine, we imagine internally. And just like that, Binet helps us to gradually find back to ourselves in a world that has turned us numb in the way we perceive the lives we lived and known.
Lara Konrad
