All the energy of the interactive situation object/subject in Nicolás Lamas’ work becomes something dialectical, a sort of action and counter-action unfolding through time. The entanglement between ideas and particles, the continual honing of speculation and making through emerging materials, the occlusion of evidences and the loosening of subversive energies trapped in objects are features shared both by Nicolás' work and archaeological disciplines. Every site opened up and engaged through the craft skills of making objects or through the sensibility to liberate them has the transformative potential to shape a type of archaeology that transcends the human category to position objects within new systemic structures.
Adopting this attitude allows him to resist the constructed perception of matter as a passive entity, a stance that is both symbolic and liberating. After all, the fact that everyday objects are embedded in unexpected combinations is as much an act of rearticulating human grammars as it is an act of empowering objecthood. In earlier works by Nicolás, the active body of the viewer is usually considered in relation to the objects, sometimes disarticulated among several layers of material information. Thus, the human impression is deprived of the complete vision that would enable us to understand the physical dynamics that weave those objects together. In later works the objects displayed don’t reveal the exact properties that their functions ascribe to them: two animal bones inside a pair of bright yellow sneakers refer to the potential life of those materials and not so much to their material connotations. We see prostheses of animal bodies, almost like leftovers that will eventually disintegrate.
Another important element in his recent works is the relationship between the concave and the interior –which is glimpsed through dark gaps and allows immateriality to slip in– as well as the intricate between digital technology and the surfaces of the human body. In general, all of Lamas’ works reference these tensions between the human body as object and matter as an active factor. The idea of the object as an archaeological evidence that appears in certain compositions doesn’t reference to its passivity, and rather functions as a kind of assemblage that has to do with the incorporation of words, images, shapes and found objects to signify the distinctive attributes of those objects as an intrinsic element of a disembodied humanity. However, it is the interstice zones that are primarily interesting for Nicolás. The in-betweens, the spaces of transition between objects, amid the objects and the body, between concepts themselves are crucial in his work.
Through his eyes, matter often presents itself as a complex archaeological site characterised by a range of inanimate materials, life forms, technological artefacts, times in collapse and linguistic references. These structures combine fiction, life and inertness while triggering a space of transaction between the human linguistic way of apprehension and other forms of activating perception. Both human and non-human negotiate a dynamic entanglement with each other. Similarly Lamas’ oeuvre defies stability. Yet, there are recurrent approaches in his practice such as an interest for industrial products, the traces of humanity on nature or the body/technology entanglement; he also puts forward an aesthetic relationship between his work and rituals that invoke ephemeral images created by impulsive composition and interdependent making. ‘‘Concerned with cosmogonic preoccupations tending to influence the course of the universe in a propitiatory way’’, Nicolás’ work enables a form of perception beyond the visible, where it is impossible to understand one part without the other as he gives form to a tense balance, creating cosmologies from the mundane and spatial frictions between materials. Works like ‘‘Potential Remains’’ are examples of the artist’s preoccupation with the life of objects as part of a net of living and inert energies. His work follows the rhythms and flows of artefacts, materials and bodies, and as such is an indicative of a time when artistic perceptions are actively appropriating the objectual codes of pre-Western aesthetics as much as invocating the sensibilities of digital technology in order to imagine potential global scenarios. An archaeology able to challenge viewpoints through his looming, with the capacity to subvert established categories, to undermine long-held assumptions, to go round static forms of classification and to break out old and established channels.
Things that emerge from this archaeology get then appropriated by certain groups or categories, whose authority is mutable, hybrid and sometimes out of control. The materials encountered present one face or another while turning other faces away - depending in part on the methods and ideas applied, the degree of openness/resistance to having those ideas materially embodied.