Magali Reus makes art from mundane, everyday objects. Fire extinguishers, nuts and bolts, rucksacks, mattress springs: things that help the world tick over but are never given serious aesthetic consideration. Out of it comes her tricksy, slippery, faintly neurotic brand of sculpture, currently on display at the South London Gallery.
The Holland-born, London-based artist works with a slick form of fabrication – casting in resin, 3D printing, laser-cutting, even creating the webbed fabric that’s used for seatbelts. Images culled from magazine covers and other ephemera are made into tactile reliefs. For all the factory-like processes involved, there’s an icky, bodily quality to these works; they made me think of that weird satisfaction you get from peeling protective film from the face of a brand-new phone.
What hobbles so much of Reus’s work is a tendency to make a song and dance of its own existence. In ‘Crane’, casts of pots are left self-consciously on their side; in ‘Sentinel (Latchtail)’, seatbelt fabric spools across the ground with a flourish. Deliberate, yes – but it feels like shop-window merchandising, and cheapens the intricacy of everything else.
Which is why the ‘Hwael’ works are the best things in the show, and by a long sight. These fibreglass structures, based on the chassis of a bus, look like enormous versions of those frames you pop the parts of an Airfix model from, studded with little scenes-within-scenes like a cast of a trainer bounded in parcel tape. Far more deadpan and less affected than the other pieces, they hint at the alchemy Reus is reaching towards. They’re highlights in what is otherwise a beguiling but underwhelming exhibition.