Lot 148: LEANDRO ERLICH

La Vista (The View)
 

Overall installation: 79 x 56 x 44 in. (200.7 x 142.3 x 111.8 cm); screens 3 1/4 x 6 in. (8.3 x 15.2 cm) each. <br> <br> <br>

<br>Installation of thirteen dvds on lcd screens with glass window pane and walls.

1997-2005

51st Venice Biennale Italian Pavilian, June 12-November 6, 2005

L. Erlich & G. Sacco, Argentina: la Biennale di Venezia 49. esposizione Internationale d’Arte, Venice, 2001, pp. 36-37 (illustrated)

Galerie 43, Buenos Aires

A voyeur’s dream, Leandro Erlich’s La Vista is a striking play on reality. Erlich is famous for his ability to confound the viewer’s sense of what is real and what is perceived, consistently blurring the lines between both. La Vista is as profound as it is fascinating. The viewer peers through a constructed window, complete with Venetian blinds, to the apartment building across the street – in this case a fabricated façade with twelve different DVDs playing on a loop. What they see are twelve different apartments whose inhabitants go about their daily lives seemingly unaware of being watched.
The viewer is intrigued as different stories unfold in the building across the street, temporarily forgetting that what they are watching is contrived. They know that they should not be watching but are unable to look away. Fans of Hitchcock will easily recognize the similarities between this piece and one of his most famous movies, The Rear Window, in which James Stewart plays a man temporarily confined to a wheel chair who spends his days observing his Greenwich Village neighbors through his back window. The camera’s perspective in The Rear Window mirrors the viewer’s perspective in La Vista. As the plot of the movie evolves, Stewart witnesses and ultimately helps to solve a murder. Various secondary plotlines emerge, creating a complicated web of stories that ultimately teach Stewart not only about the different facets of humanity but also about his own nature. Many people have interpreted the film as representing the spectator and the screen, something that Erlich literally embodies in La Vista. This ability of his to intelligently confound the viewer and question the real world is what has garnered him a position as one of the most provocative artists of his generation.