VIENNA, AUSTRIA.- The Wiener Secession, Association of Visual Artists, presents David Lamelas, on view through September 10, 2006. Since the 1960s, David Lamelas has been among the most important proponents of a conceptual approach to art. Especially his early structuralist films and media installations, made when he was living in Belgium, London, and Los Angeles in the sixties and seventies, display a highly individual treatment of time and space. In his projects, Lamelas deals impressively with the question of the limits of art’s temporality and its potential for creating alternative processes of communication and cognition.

David Lamelas’ installational interventions reject the supposed neutrality of minimalist practice in clearly critical terms, with particular emphasis placed by the artist on examining the concept of the artwork itself in relation to the role of the author and the viewer. Rather than contenting himself with viewing the artist simply as a political subject or intensifying this role, he creates spaces for a process of critical analysis that eschews moralizing. With his works, Lamelas pursues recurring motifs whose almost singular orthodoxy, embedded in the language of modernity, express a great analytical will and a sense of imagination and utopia.

Lamelas’ interest manifests itself in a definition of art that is not local or national but immaterial. In the architectural and three-dimensional interventions created parallel to his film works, he undertakes an almost visionary study of the relations between space, time, and place. Here, too, space is not measured in geographical dimensions but considered solely in terms of its intellectual and transnational scope.

For the Galerie at the Secession, Lamelas has devised a site-specific intervention which temporarily redefines the determinants of the space. A long, walk-in wedge made out of wood runs through the entire gallery. As a communicating counterpart to this piece, a film loop is shown in the Kreuzraum which constitutes a media rendering of the three-dimensional volume.

(Spatial) volume is transferred into (film) time. The film shows a sequence of the ocean at morning in Los Angeles. On the visual level of the film image, the apparent rigor of the conceptual and analytical correspondence between the two settings is cancelled out in an archaic image of (the ocean’s) timelessness and endless space.

In an interview with the British curator Lynda Morris, Lamelas describes this ambivalence between analytical rigor and an immaterial (even poetic) gesture, which plays a key part in his work, as follows: “It is impossible for me to make definitive statements. A piece is defined by the person who looks at it.”

In the Grafisches Kabinett, Lamelas will show his new film The Light at the Edge of a Nightmare, made over several years in London, Paris, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Los Angeles. Here, too, time and space are defined via a conceptual structure. It is a film noir divided into five sections, each showing more or less the same action, running through the urban scene of the five above-mentioned cities in which David Lamelas has lived in recent years. It describes an eternally returning episode, referring equally to the temporality of the urban and to major narrative themes and gestures of Hollywood productions.