Unlost: An Artist's Exploration on Resilient Materiality

0270501’s works are informed by a range of experiences within diverse visual economies — an artistic approach of constant interaction between the different fields that the artist explores — a process that embraces chance, accidents, and exceptions, driven by ideas, form, and materiality. Traditional objects and ideas with modern notions were reconstructed, juxtaposed, and integrated into the works, offering new perspectives on the conscious act of creation as a way of meditation and finding what was once lost.

The history and past encounters between materials became the deciding factor in their selection. It is the start of the creative process — plucking objects from their trajectory and bringing them close to each other, translating their conversation to create an entrance to the mind. Just like everyday commodities that travel between production warehouses and mundane objects that enable our society — they find themselves in a gallery, sitting next to objects mostly not here in their entirety. Then entropy takes over. Nevertheless, the acceptance of unrest and impermanence, letting things in motion and in their transitory nature, lends the world meaning rather than pristine and quiescence.

0270501 begins with the emotive power within the essential crudeness of the materials used to execute the works. Using industrial materials to highlight imperfections, creating edges and gradients within the pieces, and juxtaposing with the raw and organic to conceive an environment that seemingly forms a space of nothingness. In the artist’s creative process, which he defined as Meditative Chaos, the creations became monuments and mementos embodying the artistic dialogue between the artist and his materials. Seeking to transcend conceptual barriers, the artist chose to leave his works untitled, and thus remove himself from any predisposition or connection beyond the work’s immediate existence. Influenced by Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Yves Klein, and the Gutai performers, 0270501 focuses on channeling energy through his materials and method, exploring creative gestures and the spiritual connection between the artist and the work.

“The goal of art isn’t to attain perfection, but perhaps to share who we are and how we see the world. Artists allow the audience to see things they already know but are unable to notice: through an artistic lens that is singularly different from others, so miraculously profound that reminds us of who we are and who we can be.”

The work is the process. The entire painting resembles a texture rather than a message. The organic form of the work that develops is beyond the artist's control, perhaps a conscious absence of control to create an emptiness. On the other, by using paint and found objects as media, the works facilitate a contradictory state in which the traces of physicality and individuality are fascinated by the act of repetition, infinity of variation, and the simplicity involved in inscribing the ubiquitous imperfect forms.

For the dense surfaces of the monochrome paintings, 0270501 combines raw pigment with volcanic ash debris, sawdust, wood, pulp, natural fibers, and other studio materials in an act of gestural creation. When the material layers dry, movements and form reveal themselves. These fractured gestures result from nature's unpredictability and chance as well as the artist's creative process.

The artist’s unpolished sculptures evoke images of chaos and disorder, of abandoned ruins and archeological findings from a different era. Their oeuvre, in which he focuses on the use of abject repurposed materials such as debris, and industrial scrap. Anonymous and gestural, the sculptures continue the motif of raw and dismantled structures in dense materiality against the nature of light and shadow. Without having a preliminary concept in mind, the process of improvisation—intuitively creating the pieces through expressive gestures is more important than determining its result.

The narrative potential of the material’s ontology with all its qualities, traditions, attributions, and its role in the process of artistic form-finding, is examined by considering how the existence and agency of objects extend far beyond our distinctly human conceptions of them. You can still see the essence in the act of making — the artist is there — embedded in what you’re looking at. When the self becomes lost, one returns to basic things, basic material, and basic thoughts, and by imitating the gestures of the material, transforming it into gallery objects — achieved by slowing down, pausing, lingering, alighting, and unwinding. Through these actions, we can escape the entrenched trajectories we find ourselves on in the morning, rid ourselves momentarily of what we have already become, and by doing so, we can lose ourselves in thoughts of what we might be.