Sugar, We’re Going Down

Sugar, We’re Going Down borrows its title from the Fall Out Boy song that soundtracked a particular corner of Alex Morante and Enrique López Llamas’s adolescence, an era that pretty much started with the collapse of the Twin Towers and sort of ended with sparkly-skinned vampires. Perhaps that’s why Morante and López Llamas share an attraction to bodies under pressure and to the strange images that pressure can produce. Morante’s ceramics twist bodily anxiety into deteriorated creatures that seem to be mutating into fragile, vulnerable, corroded beasts, as the awareness of a body breaking down gives way to the fear of what it might become. López Llamas’s painted sculptures stage catastrophic and melodramatic displays of unsettling associations, where the anxieties of adulthood in the present world meet the persistent fear of never being enough, or not being special at all. This shared bag of emotions finds a temporary home in a crumpled, reflective silver cave. The works, placed entirely on the floor, inhabit a space that resembles a bunker, a hideout, or the headquarters of someone who has spent too much time trying to figure out what is really going on. Its paranoid logic leaves us with the sense that something is coming, someone is listening, or that somewhere things have already gone terribly wrong. This duo-show marks the end of López Llamas and Morante’s six-month stay at the Tracey Emin Foundation’s Victoria House Residency. It embraces how things come to an end, how materials fail, how bodies misbehave, how plans inevitably go south, and how there can be some kind of special comfort in knowing that we are all going down.