Leandro Katz – A (The Alphabets)
The group of works exhibited here belongs to different periods of the artist’s career and reflect his interest in paying subtle tributes to such figures as Charles Darwin (The Origin of the Species), J. Eric Thompson (Maya Hieroglyphic Writing), and Miguel de Cervantes (Don Quixote de la Mancha).
The alphabet 27 Windmills (1972) is inspired by the names that Cervantes gave to the imaginary giants by which Don Quixote was so obsessed. Assembling various images of windmills from Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, Leandro Katz creates an ellipsis suggesting that the giants were really the letters of the alphabet.
With his Achatinella Alphabet (1982), the artist associates patterns and colors of a certain species of tree snails with a kind of autobiographical writing. After gathering different specimens by the diversity of their physical markings, Leandro Katz constructs a new alphabet to write a single phrase –Man On Horseback– making reference to Darwin’s horseback campaigns. This alphabet was part of the exhibit The Judas Window, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 1982, an installation that among other works included his films of the moon, also present in this exhibition.
His Lunar Alphabet (1979), comprised of twenty seven different transitions of the moon, has given way to enigmatic phrases and sentences which compose, through photographs and drawings, an extensive project that reflect on the paradoxes between seeing and reading. In 2010, Leandro Katz’s installation Lunar Alphabet II and Lunar Sentence II was added to the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, while his seminal piece, S(h)elf Portrait (1972), was recently acquired by the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid.
The series of photographs titled Holland X, were produced in the early 1970s when he was living in the attic of an old building next to a canal in Amsterdam, where the sunlight complemented in a particular way the architecture of the space. Forming an X that rotated slowly like the blades of a windmill, the shadows seemed to imitate the typical Dutch landscape that can be seen in the painting hanging in the corner of the room.
This exhibit seeks to recreate an archaeological excavation through which we can unearth hidden premises of understanding and perception. In turn, it is hoped that this process of discovery will lead to a wide-ranging discourse on epistemology, film and the history of different forms of culture and language.