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We've become used to understanding our lives through improvement, accumulation and the expectation that whatever comes will somehow be better than what came before. That there will always be something to look forward to. But what happens, then, if we commit to giving up the fantasy of an upward trajectory? This show does not have what it takes to answer that question, though it offers a few ways to consider what it might mean to welcome failure, deterioration, anxiety, and disappointment as inescapable conditions of human experience.
Sugar, We're Going Down borrows its title from the Fall Out Boy song that soundtracked a particular corner of Alex Morante and Enrique López Llamas's adolescence, an era that pretty much started with the collapse of the Twin Towers and sort of ended with sparkly-skinned vampires. Perhaps that's why Morante and López Llamas share an attraction to bodies under pressure and to the strange images that pressure can produce. Morante's ceramics twist bodily anxiety into deteriorated creatures that seem to be mutating into fragile, vulnerable, corroded beasts, as the awareness of a body breaking down gives way to the fear of what it might become. López Llamas's painted sculptures stage catastrophic, melodramatic displays of unsettling associations, in which the anxieties of adulthood in the present world meet the persistent fear of never being enough or of not being special at all.
This shared bag of emotions finds a temporary home in a crumpled, reflective silver cave. The works, placed entirely on the floor, inhabit a space that resembles a bunker, a hideout, or the headquarters of someone who has spent too much time trying to figure out what is really going on. Its paranoid logic leaves us with the sense that something is coming, that someone is listening, or that things have already gone terribly wrong somewhere.
This duo show marks the end of López Llamas and Morante's six-month stay at the Tracey Emin Foundation’s Victoria House Residency. It embraces how things come to an end, how materials fail, how bodies misbehave, how plans inevitably go south, and how there can be some kind of special comfort in knowing that we are all going down
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