Tin, jewelry, and iron fences have been persistent in the work of Josef Strau, an Austrian identified with the Conceptual art scene that emerged from Cologne in the 1990s. Another constant has been text, usually in large quantities—but that was absent from this show, “El Comercio de los Lamentos Finos” (The Shop of Fine Lamentations), whose title evokes the baroque atmosphere of the busy downtown Mexico City shops where Strau sourced many of his materials. One had the feeling that what lay at the center of his intentions for this show was incertitude, the power of randomness and serendipity over our lives. The exhibition featured fourteen canvases painted in shades ranging from butter yellow to off-white. Varied in size, their compositions were even more so: Strau had resorted to lithomancy, the esoteric divinatory practice of throwing stones or charms to glean predictions from the patterns in which they land. The artist slung over his shoulder handfuls of rocks welded to tin sheets, which he then fixed with epoxy to the canvases where they fell.
These “approximations of paintings,” as Strau usually refers to his canvases, hung among a scenography of forced juxtapositions. A pair of knee-high curved wrought-iron fences, both titled The Fence of the Comercio de los Lamentos Finos (all works 2023), encrusted with Strau’s colorful tin-wrapped rocks, divided each side of the room. A massive mandorla-shaped table lamp sat on the floor, its light softly bouncing from the stones in the nearby canvases. At the rear of the main space, a theatrically illuminated ornamented iron gate rested against a wall, its volute designs projecting a portal of shadows behind. Photographs intercalated with the canvases on the walls showed a close-up of meteorites, a frame filled with the ripples of blue water, a bunch of wilting purple roses.
In the reduced space of the gallery’s back room, the rubbing together of these objects set off obvious sparks. Two tin-heavy paintings, Exposed to Wavelengths of Brief Attachment Withering Away like the Grass in the Evening and Eternal Beauty of Observant Seraphic Meteors, hung together facing Stones Hope of the Hopes of Poverty. All three recall the compositions Strau has favored in recent shows—landscapes of rugged tin and semi-angelic representations. Here, the tin was ripped away from the canvas, exposing its white and yellow flesh adorned with gems, glittering in yellow, orange, and blue and absorbing light in deep black. Stones was a little simpler and a lot more striking, with an almost symmetrical shape floating in the upper third of its buttery canvas: two seriously bedazzled tin wings suspended in a sunny void. Untitled—the pairing of a white-painted board and a chrome sink, both encrusted with gems—sat across the room from a dirty chunk of engraved blue Plexiglas, likely removed from a sliding shower door. A picture of a cat and another of some hands completed the stochastic scene.
Strau speaks of rocks as memory containers, an idea that has been around since at least the seventeenth century, when Nicolaus Steno first claimed that strata of layered rocks evince geological change. As such, common nonprecious stones would be just as valuable as precious ones—as would be photographs, lamps, iron railings, and all of the random objects that absorb our existence in the form of constant entropic change. In the end, tin is as shiny as silver, fool’s gold as golden as the real thing. Who are we, then, to ascribe hierarchy in a world of chaos?
