Text from exhibition portfolio, Dvir Brussels, 2017: For his sixth solo show at Dvir Gallery and his first solo exhibition in Brussels, Ariel Schlesinger has created a new ensemble of installations, sculptures and collages. Within each piece lingers the evidence of a romance alongside a good amount of humor and a disregard for conventional definitions, boundaries, and borders. Ariel Schlesinger (b. 1980, Jerusalem) is based between Mexico City and Berlin. Through a poetic gesture, his work unfolds toward a post-minimal conceptual practice and DE-functionalizes everyday objects. Using the strategies of construction and deconstruction in many of his works, Schlesinger pushes and transforms the object, creating new possibilities of understanding while also enabling surprising discoveries for the viewer within something that initially seemed utterly familiar. Departing from a background in “self-taught” engineering and with an energetic spirit, Schlesinger blurs the line between outsider inventor and studio-bound artist. The diverse and multilingual work points toward what is already gone, a new material existence, rescued from disappearance, generating a new presence through precise interventions. His numerous projects using high voltage and flames explore risk and neuter a hazardous situation into one that is well controlled. Schlesinger’s fascination with fire as a material is visible in diverse pieces where he develops its use in order to create a unique signature. His practice is a complex and imaginative tangle of personal history, philosophical and socio-political questions executed through precise craftsmanship, and miscellaneous inventions.