Every day we walk on a ground which primal substance not so long time back then was laying deeply hidden under our feet, and which is drawing now topographies of cities, towns and countrysides.

The substance itself often left unnoticed. Asphalt is incorporated into our ground like a tattoo into a skin, once accepted is not easy to erase.

Places may create their own topography of connectedness, discrete unity, beyond the asphalt surface.But bitumen pieces might appear as a coordination points for internally owned experience of the place, as constructed in Theo’s Guicheron-Lopez Asphaltotheque (beta version).

They are detached from the place but are able to say the whole story of them by their unique material minimalism. For Theo Guicheron-Lopez the crucial is a fact that those are surfaces of people’s everyday paths. Roads are tracks themselves but but only by walking we really feel the ground and we have a control on every step that touches the surface underneath. All pieces are collected from the multiple places and their unique cracks on the people’s common paths. Each example is taken from the defective areas of endless bitumen surfaces, whose structure breaks because of multiple discrete reasons. Those cracks are in the center of Theo’s Guicheron-Lopez reflection. Ruptures made of human experience of walking, plants’ forces or another factors significant to the matter activity leads to the post-geological aspect of Anthropocene reality.

While bitumen collection is grounding the overview on the post-natural phenomenon of our times, two sculptural forms are visually braking the ground. Wooden vectors are both signs of the place, maps and their destroyers. Every of the written names of bitumen origin can be pointed by them in this environment. Both of them include map of the city – Cordoba (Spain) and Arles (France), which are points of reference in Theo’s Guicheron-Lopez artistic activity in his recent three solo exhibitions.

Patrycja Plich