Joe Zorrilla
Blue Hooks
December 1, 2022 - February 11, 2023
Empiricism, tailor of our skin, has the same relationship to topology as the sonorous word has to geometry. The latter pair dominates and hides the former. Masons, architects, logicians, and geometers construct, rationalists of all language. The empiricist-tailor darns, hems, prefers looseness to hardness, folds to articulations. No, the body is not an instantaneous construction, it folds over and unfurls – puffs and gathers – it stretches out like a landscape. – Michel Serres Galerie Greta Meert is pleased to present Blue Hooks, Joe Zorrilla’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The two sculptures at the center of the exhibition simultaneously retreat into themselves and propose an external connection. The projective geometry of these two hooks revolve in a place where the sensible and the intelligible meld to formulate a question for the body in space. Coming out of a lineage of art concerned with the way objects can energize the physical world, the work reveals Zorrilla’s insistence on the metaphysical capacity of art. By focusing on the original image that came to him and defined the work, Zorrilla’s process underscores the craftsmanship of others and the complex technical means required to turn this seemingly simple image into a physical thing. The work emerged over a long period of time, the artist’s interest in allowing the piece its own fertilization and development being paramount. In Joe Zorrilla’s work the main consideration is the existence, and at times negation, of the body; the corporeal and organic/geometric condition that wonders and consumes the viewer. While the artist maintains an aphoristic relationship to the formation of works, it resists rational or didactic pretences. Joe Zorilla (b.1982, Santa Ana, CA) lives and works in Los Angles. Recent exhibitions include City, Birds and Cones, The Finley, Los Angeles (2021); JDJ|The Ice House, Garrison, NY (2019);…
Empiricism, tailor of our skin, has the same relationship to topology as the sonorous word has to geometry. The latter pair dominates and hides the former. Masons, architects, logicians, and geometers construct, rationalists of all language. The empiricist-tailor darns, hems, prefers looseness to hardness, folds to articulations. No, the body is not an instantaneous construction, it folds over and unfurls – puffs and gathers – it stretches out like a landscape.
– Michel Serres
Galerie Greta Meert is pleased to present Blue Hooks, Joe Zorrilla’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The two sculptures at the center of the exhibition simultaneously retreat into themselves and propose an external connection. The projective geometry of these two hooks revolve in a place where the sensible and the intelligible meld to formulate a question for the body in space. Coming out of a lineage of art concerned with the way objects can energize the physical world, the work reveals Zorrilla’s insistence on the metaphysical capacity of art.
By focusing on the original image that came to him and defined the work, Zorrilla’s process underscores the craftsmanship of others and the complex technical means required to turn this seemingly simple image into a physical thing. The work emerged over a long period of time, the artist’s interest in allowing the piece its own fertilization and development being paramount. In Joe Zorrilla’s work the main consideration is the existence, and at times negation, of the body; the corporeal and organic/geometric condition that wonders and consumes the viewer. While the artist maintains an aphoristic relationship to the formation of works, it resists rational or didactic pretences.
Joe Zorilla (b.1982, Santa Ana, CA) lives and works in Los Angles. Recent exhibitions include City, Birds and Cones, The Finley, Los Angeles (2021); JDJ|The Ice House, Garrison, NY (2019); Wiggle, Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels (2018); Joe Zorilla, Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels (2017); Joe Zorilla, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, CA (2015). In 2018, he was an artist in residence at The Watermill Center, NY. His work is in the collection of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Hammer Museum, and the Watermill Center amongst other institutions and private collections.