Sammy Engramer’s work is nourished by a critique of immediacy; it rejects outright the visible that produces meaning for everyone, meaning that is consumed and vaporized up at the same instant, pursuing the hierarchy of events and the immense chattering power of Opinion. The viewer is always free to interpret as s(he) wishes the work s(he) perceives; that is why the work does not have to show, or therefore say, a single thing bearing any relation to the diktat of the language in which the viewer will delight and go away feeling reassured and filled with certainty. The work must produce an infinitesimal number of leads, meanings and orientations to allow viewers to enrich themselves, and therefore “make do with their own culture.”

Originally a painter, Sammy Engramer quickly became interested in sculpture and the objects he places on stage in exhibition spaces, which he perceives as privileged moments of an aesthetic experience in a context unavoidably pervaded with political and commercial issues. Heir to the legacy of Marcel Broodthaers, he explores the relations that exist between art, discourse and object. Sammy Engramer is an active member of the Laura Group, a movement which in a purely casual way seeks to “make visible all the mechanisms of the value chain in art” but especially to “consider the implications of an art object in its context of production and exhibition.

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