Laundry, Liquid Demolition

This rain sculpture inside a partially demolished building might bring Magritte to mind. The surrealism of the work invites this parallel with the Belgian. But, in fact, the mystery of this unlikely rain falling through the concrete ceiling of the defunct Matarazzo Hospital laundry is an expression of the artist’s desire to cleanse this doomed construction. This is not Artur Lescher’s first brush with spatial poetics, much less the first time he has used water and water sounds in one of his works. What we have here is a staged purification that uses sounds and mirrors to make the rainfall visible to the passerby in the adjacent streets, who can see part of the water tank on the lower floor. Once again, the artist creates an emotionally-tinted perception of the space in which he works. (Only greywater was used to create the rain)