Beltrán, Erick

Born 1974, Mexico
Lives in Barcelona, Spain

Erick Beltrán’s design-oriented practice investigates the way language and meaning are formed through structures that are often arbitrary, though they may seem universal and inevitable. The artist concentrates on the visual and graphic formation of language, whether in the graphic designer’s use of typography or in the many variations that alphabetical forms can take across cultures.

IN THE GALLERY

Epistemic Merit Model, 2008
New work, commissioned by Parsons for "OURS"

For "OURS," Beltrán has developed a “production site,” stationed in the gallery. Users have access to an archive of 300 historic propaganda images that they can shuffle and combine at will: reproduced on old-fashioned rubber stamps, the images get printed on paper, scanned, and uploaded to the exhibition’s Web site. Each week a selection of the works is printed in large-poster format and mounted on high wires crossing the gallery windows. The posters, which evoke the photo collages of Dada and Constructivism, play with notions of artistic radicalism in relation to political ideology, and demonstrate one of the show’s main themes: though participatory strategies often provide the appearance of democratic choice, this democracy is limited to the options outlined in the structure of the game. “Action” becomes “free play” within a narrow range of often compromising options.

Epistemic Merit Model 2008

MDF table, wooden archive, wire, metal, rubber stamps, ink, sandwich boards, scanner, and paper

Dimensions variable

Courtesy the artist

ONGOING: Click here for the latest poster designs.