La Poética del Espacio
Brett Goodroad, Menchu Lamas, Jonathan Lasker, Paul Pagk and Raha Raissnia
November 14th, 2024 – January 25th, 2025
To stop at a threshold is to surrender to pause and contemplate the space of transition into something new. Allowing ourselves to inhabit this space, as an act of memory, where poetic forms emerge between the visible and its absence. It feels like a vague memory, a sense of half-remembering. The Poetics of Space, inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s La Poétique de l'Espace (1957), inhabits this threshold. It brings together works by Brett Goodroad, Menchu Lamas, Jonathan Lasker, Paul Pagk, and Raha Raissnia in a collective show. Through the artist ́s works, space transitions from something physical, into a mental resonance—an undefined place between the real and the virtual (1).
The works presented navigate the boundaries of space and form in different ways. Each one, through their own language, explores how space transforms when it dematerializes, becoming an experience. It adapts to the poetics of lived spaces.
The poetic space is never empty; it is filled with images, sensations, and memories, emerging as virtualities in the form of landscapes. These come through as virtualities in the form of landscapes. These landscapes invite the possibility of inhabiting them through observation. The artists activate these spaces—literally, as in Goodroad and Raissnia’s works, or metaphorically, as with Lamas, Lasker, and Pagk. To think of these works only for what they appear to be, or to describe them solely through our own interpretations, is to miss their essence. All of them construct spaces meant to be lived in the here and now (2).
Brett Goodroad’s outdoor painting practice revitalizes the connection between landscape and personal intervention. Similar to Raha Raissnia’s pieces Mirage and Turn, an unfixed space is created, with no static properties. Both artists extend the moment, expanding it into landscapes or captured images. A space between what is and what could be is inhabited—a refuge where perception and memory converge (3).
Jonathan Lasker’s work explores spatial transformation. He creates spaces by realigning shapes and elements and therefore redefining them. Lasker reveals the pre-existing connections between forms and their inhabited space. Unlike Goodroad and Raissnia, where there is a direct immersion in the atmosphere, Lasker’s work feels like a reconstruction. The shapes in his work inhabit a space that they themselves create. In Picture With Outstanding Form, each element exists through its relationship with the others, revealing an evolution of space. Similarly, Menchu Lamas explores how forms are reorganized through their interaction, but with a different approach. In her work, the ancestral and contemporary merge to create a virtual space that is actualized through her images. Piramide bridges different times, realities, and the possibility of new spatial perceptions.
Paul Pagk’s work maintains the tension at the threshold of space. The geometric forms, defined by their surrounding space, suggest more than they reveal. His minimalist approach exists in an expanding space, bringing to the surface what remains unseen but is implicitly present. The lines in Ishtar resist a void, filling it with possibilities and opposing forces. These forces move toward multiple variations, creating a space of illusions, a threshold where space itself becomes poetic. Like Lamas’ work, it carries illusions of physical transition.
The Poetics of Space inhabits the shifting space between what is and what could be. Bachelard’s idea of space is not one that is fixed or closed but an evolving territory where the real and the virtual constantly intertwine and transform through memory. "The interior life is not a separate world, but a world that inhabits us." It is in this space, this threshold where the invisible becomes tangible, where memory and perception converge, that the everyday becomes poetic.
(1) The real in opposition to the virtual not the false as suggested by Gilles Deleuze.
(2) Where the aura of the work of art remains according to Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(3) Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).