In Hany Armanious’s exhibition “Circle Square,” the unremarkable, careworn objects—an old log, a cardboard toilet-roll tube, wire hangers, screwdrivers, even a water glass—that form the eleven intimate sculptures took on a new life in the form of poetically arranged assemblages distributed over three gallery spaces and its basement. For instance, Delphi (all works 2024), lying on one of the gallery’s banquette benches, is made up of a stale-looking, dried-out curl of tangerine peel situated between two halves of a broken piece of Styrofoam, which appeared to have once cradled some kind of cylindrical object. Pageant, placed on another banquette, consists of a fractured piece of what looks like dark timber—actually polyurethane resin—with a roll of adhesive tape inserted into it, as if it were some odd homemade tape dispenser. The work’s title might suggest a parade float, the circular roll of tape itself standing in for a wheel and, thus, implied motion. In both cases, Armanious creates an atmosphere of forlorn poetry mixed with a pauper’s wit. It is as if his touch had given these discarded objects a new way to speak.
However, the Egyptian-born Australian’s art is even subtler than it appears. There is another significant step in his process: Far from being combinations of castaway objects, his works are predominately created by casting polyurethane and other materials. Thus, the Styrofoam of Delphi, on closer scrutiny, appeared odd, a bit unreal, or as if touched up with a light coat of paint. However, in most cases it was very hard to tell where reality ends and artifice begins, as in the case of the latticelike arrangement of screwdriver handles joined with metal in Old Work. More obvious was the golden screw from which two intertwined wire hangers hung in Wow, which is cast from gold while the hangers themselves are made with silver. The golden screw was perhaps the one item in the show that did not appear to be an ordinary fixture, but it was such a small detail, it would take an eagle-eyed viewer to catch it. Nothing in the show was really as it appeared to be, and, in the case of Wow, an everyday throwaway item had been transformed into something of greater intrinsic value—therefore, I suppose, the exclamatory title.
More important is that the original is lost through the process of casting. Armanious has created simulacra with a high level of verisimilitude, but their creation entails the destruction of the originals. A spacing is created between prototype and copy, and the replacement supersedes its referent. It’s not a fake; it’s a sculpture! Armanious’s reproductive processes raise questions about sculpture that are all the more timely now, in a moment when truth and fact seem to be in doubt. The more realistic his work, the more we have to doubt our vision. Everything he shows has been cast—and casts doubt.
