Combining an interest in archeology and artistic forms of the past with the potential of 3D scanning and printing, video images and the web, Oliver Laric produces works capable of making the digital sphere communicate with physical space, in an unceasing interweaving of perspectives and levels of reading. Whether it is his polyurethane sculptures or his videos based on the manipulation of found footage taken from mass communication channels, Laric reveals his interest in the migration of forms and images from different contexts, from a chronological, spatial or semiological point of view. What is analyzed is the path of production, consumption and use of the visual in the contemporary world, which unfolds between the ideas of uniqueness and reproducibility, of authorship and anonymity, of physicality and intangibility. In Laric’s latest video production, Untitled (2021), in an infinite digital metamorphosis the organic transition from one form to another is investigated. A liquid organicity inhabits the video in a sort of primordial soup that crosses the spatiotemporal dimension to materialize in unique forms, in an incessant dialogue between nature and artifice, between real data and the surreal. “Rendered in a dimpled, luminous grey, the animated figures in Oliver Laric’s video,” – as Carson Chan argues – “appear as if captured by a scanning electron microscope, or made of hammered tin. Sharp, rhythmic cuts bring us from one tableau to the next. A praying mantis turns its head; a crab moves across the screen; flies, worms, and eukaryote-like critters swarm; a sea urchin, lobster, and horseshoe crab are held up as if by a vendor at a seafood market; an assortment of fungi fruit from various surfaces. Everything moves with a vibrant jerkiness as in stop-motion animations or time-lapse videos. There’s a sense that we’re seeing something come into being. A lumpy mass grows a head and limbs to become a man in repose. A snout protrudes from a shapeless lump to become a frog. A figure evolves from an embryonic mass. Topologically, the sea creatures, insects, humans, and fungi are all bags or vessels—wireframe nets molded into life forms.”

Credits: Basement Roma: All images Courtesy the artist. Photo by Roberto Apa