ART
SERGIO PREGO
By Benjamin Genocchio
To take the fullest pleasure in the exhibition of sculptures and video by the Spanish artist Sergio Prego at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, you must stand perfectly still and quiet in front of “Black Monday” (2006), a single-channel video of still life photographs of controlled fireworks explosions taken inside an abandoned factory in Bilbao, Spain (above). In all, the artist took more than a thousand photographs of 17 different explosions with 40 cameras. He then scanned them into a computer, cropped them and ran them together. He also composed what he calls “a sequencing of sounds,” a series of repeating ambient electronic noises that serve as the soundtrack. The results are a multifaceted representation of something that is usually invisible to the eye: explosion clouds immobilized in time and space, forming immensely beautiful sculptural shapes. It brings out the inner pyro in all of us. Sometimes these clouds even resemble dancing figures. It is as if you were looking at a three-dimensional sculpture in video, though a few frames later, the form magically evaporates. The video lasts only three and a half minutes, which gives you just enough time to get hooked before it starts all over again. It is like stepping into another dimension.
(Sergio Prego, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 540 West 26th Street, Chelsea, 212-255-2923, lehmannmaupin.com, through Feb. 10.)