About to say: Detanico Lain | SOLO SHOW

The Gallery Martine Aboucaya is proud to present the first monographic exhibition of Detanico / Lain in Paris. Born in Brazil in 1974 and 1973 respectively, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain have been working collaboratively since 1996, producing works that range from installation to video, sound and graphic design. They have developed a highly original, analytical and thoroughly artistic practice and have made a conspicuous entry on the contemporary art scene over the last few years.

Detanico and Lain were awarded the Nam June Paik Award in 2004 (Kunststiftung, NRW, Dortmund) and have recently taken part in many significant group exhibitions, including "GNS / Le Pavillon" (Palais de Tokyo, 2003); the 9th Venice Biennale of Architecture; « Território Livre », the 26th São Paulo Contemporary Art Biennial; and the 3rd Digital Media City Seoul (2004).

The exhibition "About to Say" at the Gallery Martine Aboucaya showcases a body of new works by Detanico / Lain and also includes a new presentation of Flatland, for which they were awarded the Nam June Paik Award. In this exhibition Detanico / Lain explore the physical characteristics of the different mediums that they are using. Flatland, a video work of hypnotic power and a fascinating study of space-time, was thus carried out by the artists through a direct intervention on the materiality of digital images. With the new series of videos entitled Selected Landscapes(2005), Detanico / Lain have carried forward this technique of denaturalizing digital images in order to disclose the distinct forms of dramatization that characterized them.

Detanico / Lain will also present a new series of "texts" (Sans Titre, 2005) based on a typographic font that they invented with Jiri Skala, Helvetica Concentrated, and which only displays the distinct mass of ink used for each character. While this series shows an interrupted printing process, Le Journal Découvert, another of their projects included in the exhibition, unfolds, on the contrary, as a form of an extended printing process. With this work, the artists use the cover of the daily newspaper Le Monde as a starting point for an exercise in concrete poetry.

The exhibition "About to Say" by Detanico / Lain is thus organized through a series of détournements and "disorientation games"; their approach - their quest for precision and exactness - shows the power and the policy of their underlying vision.