What has already happened

In Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), René Descartes reflects on a piece of wax: “the taste is eliminated, the smell evaporates, the color changes, the shape is lost.”1 Despite these transformations, he argues, reason alone allows us to recognize it as the same substance. This notion – that material change is secondary to abstract knowledge – assumes a stable essence beneath transformation. But what if destruction does not reveal a deeper truth, but instead resists the very idea of permanence? Elene Latchkepiani’s practice challenges this assumption, treating transformation not to uncover an underlying reality, but as the work itself. In her sculptures, materials – plaster, oil paint, burned wood, carved marble, and melted plexiglass – exist in a state of flux, shaped by forces of destruction and reconfiguration. Breaking down is not an endpoint but a generative process, where materials continuously shift and reform. Sculptural assemblages reject fixed meaning, embracing instability instead. Burned surfaces, fractured edges, and altered textures reveal matter in motion. These materials do not return to an original state; rather, they exist in cycles of becoming, where destruction asserts presence over absence. In the show, the artist assembled sculptural elements and found objects directly in the exhibition space, responding intuitively to their inherent qualities and interactions. Rather than constructing a predetermined order, her approach invites unpredictability, allowing meaning to emerge through material encounters. Latchkepiani resists the idea that transformation must be understood through abstraction or detached observation. Instead, it foregrounds the immediacy of physical engagement – where the instability of materials mirrors the shifting nature of perception itself.