Josef Strau

This exhibition draws on vocabulary Josef Strau has mastered to great effect: Collections of ramshackle lamps and texts are arranged around his characteristic white paintings, symbols that interface in a willful conceptual static. Exhibiting his works in a self-styled “retrospective,” Strau’s show looks not backward but down—into a constellation of cardboard tunnels and Styrofoam boards, onto low-lying receptacles of information scattered around a room viewers must squat to explore. In a further layer of disorientation, Strau has written monologues that are spoken by an unseen computer; the voice of each monologue cuts in on the others, an overlapping sequence of female monotones that incessantly drown their own content.

Strau’s work is a sardonic intervention, a celebration of contingency parading as a ritual of completeness. This aesthetic of fragility betrays its own purchase as a signifier: Just as there are concealed truths and unuttered variances in the most digestible of narratives, Strau’s anti-narrative deals in cogencies (anti-ideational, anti-commodity) that beg consumption. At the core of this practice is a heady ambivalence, one that questions and complicates the artist’s own sale of ideas in a commercial space. While Strau effectively turns this friction into a kind of play, his work is haunted by the knowledge of how much lies just outside the lamplight, where the white walls of the gallery begin to fade to gray.