Edgar Orlaineta

In We Do Not Work Alone, Edgar Orlaineta’s masterful mid-century craft-based works co-opt the minds of viewers to complete the exhibition.

In his new exhibition, We Do Not Work Alone at Proxyco Gallery, Edgar Orlaineta offers a phenomenological exploration of objects in space. With this arrangement of works he invites the viewer to participate in a gestaltist “mental idea” of the objects in spatial and temporal context rather than merely witness a display of inert formal conclusions. This acknowledgement of the exhibition’s dependence on the spectator to complete the work is both a philosophical stance and a nod to the historical antecedents that inform the individual pieces, leading Orlaineta to suggest that, We Do Not Work Alone.

Edgar Orlaineta’s work is known for fusing exhaustive historiographical research into the midcentury era with a mastery of a variety of modernist craft techniques including: woodturning, metalworking, weaving, drawing, painting and assemblage.

Orlaineta considers it a paradox that today craft is celebrated as it is neglected. He considers this a phenomenological anomaly symptomatic of a world connected and occurring at vertiginous speeds. Craft both privileges the hand of the artist and implies a delay in the artisanal object’s time-consumptive production. Orlaineta instrumentalizes both of these nuances of craft as a purposeful means of creating space for thoughtfulness and as a subversive tactic to subvert the ego through meditative physical process? To quote Duchamp; “the idea is before the eye, but in this case the hand is before all.”