Daniel Arsham keeps on investigating time through a protean work, juggling with elegance between sculpture, drawing, installation, painting and video. Somewhere between ultra-realism and an aesthetic of decay, the works of this American artist both touch and question…
Born in 1980 in Cleveland, Ohio, Daniel Arsham grew up in Florida where, as a child, he witnessed Hurricane Andrew ravage the family home. God’s word is spoken. It is a fragile world, an uncertain time. How to express it through art?
Daniel Arsham’s way of expressing the world is through a fictional archaeology, where objects as basic as a game console or a baseball cap are transformed into fossils of the future. Ultra-realistic sculptures made of rare materials, highlighting the eroded, life-size reproduction of the car from Back to the Future. Underneath the neo pop art and playful aspect of the Future Relic series, he challenges us and questions the perception of our time by future generations. When he chooses not to look at the present to build his archaeology of tomorrow, Daniel Arsham revisits the past, and in particular Antiquity. Thus, Moonraker brings together a series of sculptures inspired by ancient civilizations. We find the Venus of Arles, a Buddha, a bust of Hercules… A work that begins with the design of casts before the artist deteriorates them as time passes. Then, comes the moment to heal the wounds thanks to the use of mineral plaster, crystal, quartz geode or blue calcite. Materials that were obviously not used at the time of the conception of these ancient sculptures. As a result, the effects of time no longer seem to be an inevitability, the ruins are reborn, they are sublimated and end up plunging the spectator into a dizzying non-time.
David Xoual
