OVERDIMENSIONS, 2026
Overdimensions
An immeasurable phrase inaugurates this text: the cell of a body, like a neuron, and the solar system, in which the Earth orbits, are almost the same size in the face of an infinite universe. Both are tiny fractions of a totality. The body does not reach the experience of infinity; consciousness, when confronted with it, experiences vertigo, an almost religious fear.
Overdimensions, the title of Karen Axelrud's recent exhibition of works, is a precise portmanteau word to encompass the contradictions that the works evoke. The term hovers where scales dissolve and, at the same time, gets into the body. The works seems to be made for a non-human observer, destituted of a stable center, of a secure hierarchy between figure and background, color and texture, form and detail, as if a visuality of another order united them. For our eyes, the form does not stabilize: the look hesitates, returns, gets lost. The works sustains, in a single chord, orientation and loss, method and excess.
There is a system of copying, repetition, and inversion within them. Their main instruments are, on the one hand, order, through stencils, maps, scales, representations of the planet and the cosmos, as well as elements of architecture; on the other side, chaos, which emerges from the repetition and overlapping of these elements, revealing the instability of the systems that intend to order the world. Discipline does not eliminate lack of control; on the contrary, it is what allows it to pass through. The stencils, normally associated with precision, become what allows the unforeseen to enter: the blur happens, the flaw is inscribed, the color, which should remain contained, overflows. In Overdimensions, repeating is not reiterating the same, but forcing the form until something previously unnoticed emerges from it, like a window that opens onto other possible dimensions of reality.
Laura Cattani, 2026
Laura Cattani is an artist, independent curator, researcher, and cultural manager. She holds a master's degree (2012) and a doctorate (2018) in Visual Poetics from PPGAV/IA/UFRGS, and completed postdoctoral studies (2020) at PPGAV/UnB.