Carla Arocha & Stéphane Schraenen: As if

The off-hand nonchalance of the title, now a loaded statement in the popular vernacular, might indicate a certain cynicism or world-weariness; a jaundiced eye cast in the direction of art and its efforts. But, like so many other aspects of their work, this is something of an illusion and an allusion. 

The title equally refers to the formal and material nature of their new work itself. Within the work of Arocha – Schraenen, simile and facsimile are often content; the nature of an image and its similarity or distance from the perception of that image. In the works that play with layering and blurring the lines between what is, in reality, a solid surface and what is only a reflection –or the facsimile of a tangible material – Arocha – Schraenen join the dotted lines between Modernism’s approach to something nearing an abstracted form of representation and the age old mimetic thrust of art drawing upon observations of the world around us.