Alex Da Corte

BAM! BAM! BAM!
EENWERK HELLO

EENWERK in Amsterdam is a space for visual arts, design, architecture, photography, performance and poetry. Founded in 2017 by Julius Vermeulen, EENWERK was established to make exceptional exhibitions of single projects. 

EENWERK HELLO initiates a new strand of its programme hosting international galleries expanding its own activities and the Amsterdam context with perspectives from contemporary art galleries worldwide. This September Sadie Coles HQ say hello with a new work by Alex Da Corte.  

BAM! BAM! BAM! is a painting triptych featuring the iconic comic canine Snoopy, and it will be shown alongside three of Da Corte’s ongoing puzzle sculptures. In the EENWERK library, a selection of weird and wonderful printed matter from the artist's collection will be complemented by material from Irma Boom's library.

For his first exhibition in Amsterdam, the Venezuelan-American artist continues his series of Object Paintings, which bring key elements of the composition ‘out of bounds’, developing his longstanding practice of painting-in-reverse in the style of traditional animation cels by placing the cartoon symbol in the scene as a sculptural element that grows outside of the work, stretching and defying the conventional authority of the frame.

Da Corte both utilises and unravels the cues of childhood comics, pushing familiar expressions of hope, love and stability into uncanny places where they don’t historically belong. In the three frames, subtly tweaked from an eight-panel Sunday newspaper strip from 30 October 1966, Snoopy considers a front door to a home. First an approach, where everything seems possible. Then the creature wants something – the central image’s onomatopoeic text reading ‘BAM! BAM! BAM!’ amplifies their excitement, or growing impatience. A burst of warm light in the final frame tells of satisfaction, a resolution, though the viewer will never know why or what for. Snoopy occupies each frame in a single sweeping movement, amplifying time in a manner that is at once frozen and dilated by the jumping format of the storyboard narrative. The work hinges around a central act of violence: as Snoopy attempts to kick down the door, it is unclear whether it is entitlement, lust or peril motivating their aggression. The chopped, cyclical nature of Da Corte’s story speaks to an American animation that does not end, and the possible meanings that grow within its flicker. 

Three colourful sculptures resembling children’s puzzles accompany Da Corte’s painting in the second room, standing pieced together like three-dimensional jigsaws with the possibility of complete deconstruction. Le Coup au Coeur (2022) looks formally to René Magritte’s 1952 painting of the same name – in both the sculpture and the original painting the flower’s softness stands at odds with the suggestive violence of the dagger. In Lucy (2021) the purple flower motif returns, held by the ubiquitous cartoon dog positioned beside its respective red wooden ‘home’. The third sculpture, St Elmo (2023), repurposes the classic Hasbro children’s game ‘Elefun’, depicting an elephant cheerfully raising aloft a sparked stick of dynamite in its trunk. Each durable yet dismantlable structure contains a surprise: a moment of nostalgia is wrapped uncannily in objects whose delicate, exactingly engineered construction conjures associations with American labour and consumerism.

Having described his artistic approach as sculpting in a ‘field of dreams’, Da Corte rejects the stark division between the innocent fantasies of youth and the supposedly complex internal landscapes of adulthood, asking himself and the audience: what happens when we step through the door? He paints a picture of an opening yet blocks our entrance; he builds a sculpture that can exist together and apart, inside and outside. Snoopy, like us, exists both within and beyond the artist’s imaginary world, acting as spectator and participant. By reconfiguring emblems of mass culture through an approach of total bricolage, Da Corte constantly finds new ways of looking at things we find familiar. A multi-channel lens, he mimics the way we access, and are implicated in, the consumption of information.