Max Estrella is delighted to present Optical Flow, an exhibition of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Mexico City, 1967) most recent work. This is the artist’s third art show at the gallery and serves to reinforce his continuous commitment to virtuality. Among all different practices within Electronic Art, it is digital light installations that he’s mostly focused on.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is considered one of the most relevant electronic artists of our time. He makes interactive installations that are at the intersection of architecture and performance art, characterized by the mediation between his spectators’ bodies and technological devices. More than mediation, he seeks to raise a certain degree of need between both parts to achieve the interpretation exercise of the work.

Optical Flow is the apparent movement of objects caused by the relative movement between an observer and the scene. All five works that are part of the exhibition, consider the audience’s point of view in order to articulate a discourse that reflects on visual perception. This concept is defined by the artist as “an active event of constructing reality from distortions, blends, gradients, filters, and fields of light; a violently energetic vibration that is out of control regarding perception”.

In this exercise of referencing the spectator, the pieces titled Vanishing Points and Semioptics for Spinoza detect the tridimensional position of the viewer, while in Recurrent Sanches it is the virtual object that moves in relation to the visitor. Meanwhile, External Interior also activates its movement concentrating on the audience: as visitors introduce their head inside the sphere, they see a reflection multiplied kaleidoscopically. Finally, Polar makes a transcription of the individual’s position to polar coordinates. In all of them, Lozano-Hemmer lays out a path where he subtly suggests the spectator to consider an exceptional relationship with space and introspection; that is, being referenced to construct perception of the surrounding space, and the meaning of the resulting interaction.

Lozano-Hemmer was the first artist to officially represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition at Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel in 2007. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the SFMOMA San Francisco, MUAC Mexico City, the Contemporary Museum of Art of Sydney, among others. He is now exhibiting at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and at the 12th Shanghai Biennale.