Leandro Erlich: Port of Reflections

In a 2014 interview Leandro Erlich observed, “I became interested in perception as a way to question our sense of reality. I am not so much interested in illusion per se, in the sense of tricking or fooling peoples’ perception, but I’m rather interested in illusion as a way of questioning reality.” For Erlich this inquiry is rooted in the ordinary. In installations based on the architecture of the everyday, such as staircases, elevators, swimming pools, building facades, gardens, and ports, he paradoxically turns inside out and upside down, challenging our senses and unsettling our expectations. His work serves to stimulate our consciousness and liberate our imagination. Erlich juxtaposes reality and fantasy, the playful and the profound, to build environments that exceed the bounds of logic, creating uncanny spaces in which multiple realities may coexist. Port of Reflections, presented for the first time in North America at the Neuberger Museum of Art, is Erlich’s most ambitious and poetic museum installation to date. In this work, Erlich depicts a serene nighttime harbor in which five colorfully painted rowboats appear to float, gently rocking, as their reflections shimmer in the dark waters below. The artist blurs the boundary between reality and illusion, not merely to confuse or astound, but to encourage us to question how we perceive and relate to the world through ambiguous sensory data. Erlich employs paradox and surprise to subtly subvert the familiar, transporting us to a dreamlike world that runs parallel to yet departs from our own, expanding our notions of the possible.

Leandro Erlich is the recipient of the 2017 Roy R. Neuberger Exhibition Prize given to an exceptional artist for an early-career survey and monographic catalogue. A selection of models and photographs tracing the artist’s trajectory is also on view.