Josef StrauEl Comercio de los Lamentos FinosMayMay 26th - JulyJul 7th, 2023Gaga Mexico City

The artist became jeweler impressed by the ambivalent combination of its dry objectivity on one side and the extreme illusionary world of value creating attributions of the alluring materiality of the stones themselves. The gallery turned into an exchange for stones and another illusionary trading place for rather ephemeral exquisite exchange, long echo of the „Metaphysical Store“, „Montezuma Jewelries“ „Galerie Meerrettich“ , „Il Comercio de Lamentos Finos“ expands into further discoveries of the dream to emigrate from art reference into the complex and somehow paradox realms of precious stones or particularily following into the very puzzling gravitations, synonym of attachments, sometimes opening in little steps the doors to trading with spirits even, the magnetism of meteorites or other gravitations, metaphors to humans souls desires and sufferings whenever influenced by their many gravitations and consequently impacted by their erosions and attritions, attachments to become like the attrition of the stones.

To work with stones is a slow exercise of overcoming the bias that connects simple stones or rocks to poverty, to lifelessness and emptiness at the same time, excluding those paradoxes of stones, as well as they are incredible containers of pain and of happiness and watchful eye from their comparably almost eternal life‘s perspective and containing their secrets of their memories, as often referred to in ancient or premedieval literature.

The story of the stones as living stones in an animated universe, the medieval or pre-medieval perceptiveness for the life of stones, both in historic literature and contemporary science, finding the stones that are refused, to practice of showing discoveries, findings, although appearing as the worthless, committing to trash findings of long walks, trading them like trading stones or even as numbers, later fleemarket lamps or found metal pieces and titles and stories attached and trading rather their little titles hopefully too.

The artist connects stone and meteorite objects in an exercise of throwing little pieces of seemingly disconnected “ideas” on paper or little objects into boxes and waiting, as if it was an interior box somewhere within the brain and then later, observing the box, waiting, if these little ideas develop connections automatically, beyond intentionality, somewhere in the brain’s imaginary box, and then kind of harvesting the box to put a little tag with names on it and transferring results into the more public trade box, the trade site of objects and desires and regrets of the public businesses of galleries.

After a year long longing and following his own footsteps, and after the most pleasant memories of mimicking the craft of jewelers, the jeweler sets the stones found in Mexico into smooth metal bases, using the soft and easy burning tin, and later throws them slowly, one after the other, in the content, in most incidental ways observing the developments of patterns, onto the yellowish, almost golden landscapes and surfaces of the canvas, like ideas in the “cybernetic” boxes, the pattern imitating unintentionally the meteoric, almost eternal lives and pathways through time within the empty space of the universe still far away from powerful bigger gravitational impacts.