Timeless Flows / Cognitive Sediments

Nicolás Lamas’s work could be understood as a fragmentary and heterogeneous circulation of ideas and materials in constant negotiation; as a complex network of knowledge that mingles the natural and cultural worlds through undefined procedures, methodologies and parameters. Influenced by random processes and speculative dialogues between different materials, Lamas breathes life into hybrid forms that redefine their own logic and the viewer’s perception, transcending preconceived ideas and immersing us in a realm where structures of knowledge are constantly dissolved and reconfigured.

This exhibition is subtended by an archaeological legacy coexisting with the timeless flows of various materials, cognitive sediments which engage in open dialogues with ever-evolving technologies. From the vantage point of the present, where dissecting these temporalities feels overwhelming, Lamas intervenes with materials and images, reversing industrial logic and traditional museographic schemes to create new perspectives on formal and cultural transformation. In one of the pieces, Cultural Sediments, the artist deploys fragments of an amphora in progressive layers within a display case, reorganising its original structure in a visual stratification that also resonates with Parallel Worlds. In this work, a series of National Geographic magazines are altered by removing intermediate pages between two images from different articles, generating diptychs with open-ended, poetic associations that radically differ from the categorical modes of scientific knowledge.

In Lamas’s work, objects exist independently of human perception and are not limited ontologically by their relationships with subjects or with each other. His practice is a pact with chance and provisional improbabilities. In Neurocoral, a brain-shaped coral rests on a car transmission valve. The symbiosis between organisms and machines is a recurring theme in his work, exploring resonances between past and present modes of production and consumption, while at once acknowledging an underlying ecological urgency. In Circularity and Stagnation, a bronze vessel once used in ancient Chinese funeral rituals is filled with used motor oil and attached to an aluminium gearbox. Both materials—bronze and aluminium—evoke milestones in the history of technology, forging a temporal and formal link between cultures while subverting their original functions and values. In another work, Dystopic Heritage, a photographic montage shows a diachronic landscape in which the ruins of Pergamon, home to the second most important library in human history after Alexandria, are juxtaposed with a tyre dump, visually and temporally linking the zenith of Hellenic culture with the industrial remnants of our present.

Palaeontology and anatomical dissection are equally prevalent across his practice. In Biomechanical Equipment, a toolbox with steel ratchets is coupled with fragments of human bones. This assemblage not only evokes the hybridisation of body and machine but also reminds us that bone was one of the first materials used to create tools. This same body-machine relationship is further explored in Planned Obsolescence, where a mechanical podium supports a plaster reproduction of Marsyas, the mythological figure punished by Apollo in a musical challenge. The sculpture is elevated above a Xerox photocopier, now a relic of document replication technology. Its dissection humanises it: when the machine’s inner workings are exposed, its internal network of circuits resembles a quasi-biological anatomy, revealing a structure suggestive of organic ligaments or neural networks.

Lamas explores the dilemmas of planned obsolescence and informational overload in an era of technological acceleration, where the capacity to process and preserve knowledge is increasingly more limited against an ever-expanding volume of data. In his series: Letters to the Future, he juxtaposes traces of contemporary electronic circuits and components with ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform writing. And so he conceives a genealogy of tools to control knowledge that, despite its apparent omnipotence, reveals the tension between the human desire to preserve relevant information, the inevitable fragility of the systems we construct and their imminent obsolescence.

Jorge Luis Borges’s dictum, “The impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe cannot dissuade us from outlining human schemes, even though we are aware that they are provisional,” seems to resonate in Lamas’s work like an echo of the flimsiness of our cultural constructs. In his art he conjures a speculative future where knowledge, influenced by chaos and chance, takes on a logic that challenges any deterministic intention. Brought up in a family of scientists—his mother is a forensic chemist and his father a director at the Natural History Museum in Lima—Lamas developed a sensitivity to the classification and organisation of knowledge, and yet, in his practice, this is transformed into an engagement with the “ontological chance” of objects and the “epistemological chance” of knowledge, where scientific precision gives way to uncertainty and a hybrid, speculative knowledge.

Ultimately, Lamas invites us to view his work as an anarchic, dissonant encyclopaedic practice in which symbiotic associations between objects, images and concepts from diverse contexts give shape to alternative categories, challenging traditional boundaries between nature, culture and technology. In this way he tells us that human knowledge systems cannot encompass the entirety of a universe where cultural and technological evolution is profoundly nonlinear. Like living systems, this is a process of constant evolution and adaptation, shaped by information flows and chaotic interactions. In this sense, art emerges as a sanctuary for rhizomatic knowledge, offering a kaleidoscopic vision of encyclopaedic learning where past and present intersect and contaminate one another, forging timeless connections between material components and their constantly evolving cultural histories.