Say a word repeatedly and it can lose its meaning. In the same way, the longer one stares at one thing or another - a tree, for example - so its identity and meaning can begin to loosen from it, leaving one with just, well, some thing. Certainly, a thing as real and apparently definite as the tree it once was. But a thing once again imbued with a mystery that somehow challenges the idea that calling it a tree got us any closer to knowing what it really was.
Without a name, what remains of a thing, essentially, is form. Form is arranged matter. Less definite, perhaps, but no less substantial and arguably more lastingly true by being alienated from its limiting descriptors. We are not our names, as much as it is convenient to pretend that we are. Say your own name aloud and then wonder if this is all of you. The order and arrangement of the world around us may indeed be seen as a desperate attempt to bring it under our control.
Givan Lötz is having none of it. His latest show Unearthly at the Association for Visual Arts (AVA) pulls the rug from beneath us, constantly probing at the idea that the names we give things are in fact arbitrary and, when taken away, that the world around us devolves into a multiverse of pre-named everythingness. For him, “The unbound world is fluid and dangerous...where there are no things there is only a stream of manifold, nameless sensations shifting in fullness.”
This is all of course a good thing. Lötz, you see, is persuading us to engage with a more innate - and less articulate - knowledge. Drawing from the Michael Polanyi line that “we know more than we can tell” Lötz describes his works as “an inarticulate scream.”
For Unearthly Lötz pulls together a series of what appear to be details of imagined matterscapes, things before they were called something; nebulous substances in flux. The substance seems in the process of formation, like volcanic magma before it has crystallised.
This partly explains his use of wax as a medium, a substance that is both solid and vulnerable to change. Wax is waterproof but also susceptible to being destroyed by a rise in temperature - or someone with an over curious thumb, eager to explore the inviting texture of the works. Lötz worked with what is now his trademark meticulousness to apply layer upon layer of wax in the encaustic - or ‘burning in’ - method more commonly associated with craft hobbyists. This impish elevation of a lowbrow artistic method is not surprising when you discover that Lötz has for years been a musician with distinctly punk tendencies. It is even less surprising that his songs don't have distinguishable verses and choruses. He likes to thumb his nose.
While scratching at these ideas - and refining his use of the encaustic method - during residencies in New York and Finland, Lötz found that he was creating scenes that might be microscopic in their detail or panned out so far as to be blurrily indefinite. Atoms or galaxies. The wax, then, became the glue that bound these floating atoms together, something to gather an unruly dust into a temporarily discernible item for a moment. The works are as a result best viewed in this way; alternately close up and at some distance, the effect being wonderfully confounding and immersive, as if zooming in and out of something without ever quite figuring it.
The colour palette with which Lötz works is hyperreal and as such appears false, the tones bright and almost neon, both garish and seductive. The motive in using these so-called ‘fake’ colours is to play with the idea that what appears unnatural can of course never be, being as it is a concoction of earthly materials. Here also we see more clearly the joke Lötz worked into his title.
The sculptural works - assembled branches covered in a glossy gypsum composite - appear as if strange forms retrieved from a shipwreck. Their placement has the effect of staging the show as a museum of alien discoveries, the viewing experience like stepping into an ancient cave full of mysterious and ancient clues. Are we witnessing scenes from a million years in the past, or a million ahead, a planet reclaimed by nature and long vacated by the fleeting human intrusion? Lötz doesn’t say. But perhaps we are seeing another world entirely, one that has always been there. A world simply of matter, free of its labels, radiant and beguiling. A world we recognise but can’t explain.