Ultimately I think that it is the most successful sense of the work if you actually can understand that everything has to be thought at every step. Reality is a human construction or a human understanding, it could be even an art installation. To question the real is something that this work is meant to do. [Leandro Erlich]
Leandro Erlich, Changing Room, 2008, ph. Ela Bialkowska, courtesy Galleria Continua.
Leandro Erlich is an Argentinian artist. After his solo show at Macro in Rome in 2005, he is now presenting a new installation titled Changing Rooms, which is going to be on view at Galleria Continua till next year.
Changing Rooms is a kind of labyrinth which challanges the viewer to get in and get lost in a maze of fitting rooms, whose mirrors - in some cases - have been removed; the space behind the mirror has been riproduced as many times as the mirror would do. The result is confusing and disorienting. As Alice in the wonderland we do cross a border and we enter a space where reality and fiction are mixed and our perception is undermined and no longer certain.
Leandro Erlich, Changing Room, 2008, ph. Ela Bialkowska, courtesy Galleria Continua.
Thanks to the optical illusion our attention is hold on a common and familiar space - a changing room - which we don't really pay attention to in the real world. Those rooms become a stage, the viewer is an actor and the play is our life.