{"id":8990,"date":"2019-12-03T17:34:17","date_gmt":"2019-12-03T22:34:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kolajmagazine.com\/content\/?p=8990"},"modified":"2019-12-03T17:34:17","modified_gmt":"2019-12-03T22:34:17","slug":"intarsia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kolajmagazine.com\/content\/content\/collage-exhibitions\/intarsia\/","title":{"rendered":"Intarsia"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Untitled <\/em>by David Crunelle
20″x28″ photocollage, acrylic, epoxy on wood panel; 2019
Courtesy of the artist.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Intarsia<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

at Zedes Art Gallery in Brussels, Belgium
22 November-22 December 2019<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

At the beginning of a 1930 radio broadcast for kids Walter Benjamin called upon his audience to search their memories. “I bet that if you try,” he said, “you can remember seeing wardrobes or armoires with colorful scenes, landscapes, portraits, flowers, fruits, or other similar designs inlaid in the wood of their doors. Intarsia is what it\u2019s called.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Benjamin was invoking a sort of mosaic method that gives the impression of depth through the superposing of wood. These days intarsia also refers to a similar technique of illusory layering in knitting. For Benjamin, intarsia was a great metaphor, a model for his program to follow, a giddying montage piece covering a variety of Berlin childhoods throughout the ages, “scenes inlaid not in wood, but in speech.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
INTARSIA #1<\/em> by David Crunelle
20″x20″; photocollage, acrylic, epoxy on wood panel; 2019
Courtesy of the artist.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Intarsia happens to be the name of David Crunelle\u2019s first collection of new collages in over two years. It\u2019s one hell of a trip. If Benjamin employed intarsia metaphorically, weaving stories to startling effect, so, too, does Crunelle, who likewise engages in an obsessive layering of all sorts of “stories”: postcards from the 1920s through the 1960s; decade-old pictures of New York; communist propaganda posters from China; and surprisingly, photographs from the artist\u2019s own childhood. These collages glisten like radiant jewels. Yet what of all this talk of intarsia as a ruse in which depth is but a trick of the light? Surely we aren\u2019t saying that this a shallow form of art, and that Benjamin and Crunelle, in pursuing intarsia in their own weird ways, are pulling a fast one? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The apparently contradictory answer is that intarsia demands considerable skill, its spectacular illusion the result of an especially intricate, labor-intensive craft, like professional wrestling, say, in which real blood is spilt and real backs broken in the name of performance. It is not that surface appearance is a “lie”, but rather that surface and whatever lies “below” speak one to the other incessantly, the former concealing yet wholly defined by the latter. This tension was at the heart of what Marx called commodity fetishism. Capitalist society, he wrote, “appears” as a mass of commodities, eliding the human labor that has gone into them. Social relations thus take the form of relations between things, magical things floating about the marketplace all on their own. Crunelle\u2019s great skill is in what we might call riding the fetish\u2014 comingling surface and depth such that you can\u2019t tell which is which. It is quite the achievement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(text adapted from the gallery’s press materials)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

INFORMATION<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zedes Art Gallery<\/strong>
Rue Paul Lautersstraat, 36
1050 Brussels
+32 (0)2 646 00 04<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hours:
Wednesday-Friday, 12AM-6PM
Saturday 2-6PM and by appointment <\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAP<\/a> | WEBSITE<\/a> | FACEBOOK<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Intarsia at Zedes Art Gallery in Brussels, Belgium22 November-22 December 2019 At the beginning of a 1930 radio broadcast for kids Walter Benjamin called upon his audience to search their memories. “I bet that if you try,” he said, “you…<\/p>\n

Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":8991,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/kolajmagazine.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/david-crunelle-untitled.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s2QTD7-intarsia","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11070,"url":"https:\/\/kolajmagazine.com\/content\/content\/collage-exhibitions\/ordalie\/","url_meta":{"origin":8990,"position":0},"title":"Ordalie","author":"Christopher Byrne","date":"20 May 2021","format":"gallery","excerpt":"#3 by David Crunelle5\"x3.3\"; photocollage, acrylic, varnish, ink on paper. Courtesy of the artist. 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