The Messy, Vital World of Elle

In Issue 01 when I sat down with Montreal-born, Los Angeles-based artist, David Altmejd, he mentioned something to me that didn’t quite equate until I saw his recent body of work, Elle, on view now at Bradley Ertaskiran. “I think that there's something that I've observed in the serpent work, and in some previous pieces, that's been trying to explore this feminine energy,” he said. “I would say, it's almost aggressive. It's been restrained for a really long time and it really wants to emerge. I love this, and every time I'm aware of it, when I'm working on a sculpture. I'm becoming aware of that energy and I'm touching the material.”

It seems like Altmejd is beginning to see the culmination of letting himself go into this feeling. Elle, with a new life-size figures, heads and bronze sculpture, and drawings, appears to be some of his most dense, complex and vital work, a brilliant and almost overwhelming use of repetition and energy. There are things that Altmejd admits he doesn’t understand about his own process, how he problem solves, how he sculpts, but he understands there is an energy that he is trying to define.

“It's there and it's ecstatic and it wants to be given a form. I'm a little bit afraid because I can feel that that energy is very, very powerful, but I think that it really believes in what I can give to it, and I'm really excited. I'm afraid of it, too, because I know that it's more powerful than I am.”

Elle is also exemplary in the way it is laid out. I have been obsessed with shows that are confident in give the work room to be experienced, walked around, alive. With a show that is about rupture and repair, about an energy, about force and something mythical, it becomes more absorbing when you have a physicality to act with. I try not to quote a press release too often, but the gallery nails it when they write, “"This palpable coexistence of chaos and order mimics the building blocks of matter itself, tending simultaneously toward organization and dissolution.” This is what Altmejd is trying to master, and what he found in the physicality of a sculpture that he couldn’t in drawing (although it is lovely to see him include drawings here in Montreal).

“Life contains everything and contains these infinite potentials. I like that to be in the objects I make as well. I think that humor is definitely a big, big part of my process, too. I mean, it's connected to kind of an energy, a trickster energy maybe that's really present.”

Text by Evan Pricco