【Augmented Reality——Isaac Cordal Solo Exhibition】
2026.09.02 – 2026.09.29
Augmented Reality continues the miniature scale that has defined Cement Eclipses since 2006: small figurative sculptures of the same archetypal character — a middle-aged, bald man in a grey suit — reduced to a size that forces the viewer to lean in, to look closely at something that would otherwise be overlooked. Where Cement Eclipses uses public space itself to distort scale, placing these tiny figures in cracks, corners, and forgotten urban surfaces, Augmented Reality transplants that intimacy into the gallery, using domestic and everyday objects — a sardine can, a birdcage, a face mask, a rusted oil tin — as the new architecture of confinement and exposure.
The titles trace a psychological arc rather than a narrative. Dreamer sleep on top of money, oblivious or resigned. Isolated and the Augmented Reality cage pieces show the same man boxed in, distracted by a phone or lost inside a VR headset — the cage no longer a metaphor but the literal architecture of a mediated life. The concave face of Follower returns the gaze to the spectator — an inversion in which the object being observed observes you back. Tar Pit sinks slowly into a substance indistinguishable from himself. Influencer, Eve, and Adam push the domestic or industrial object — a face mask, a found tin — toward something closer to a cradle, a trap, or packaging: the human reduced to product, origin myth reduced to branding.
Across all of them, scale is not a formal choice but a conceptual one. Shrinking the figure heightens his vulnerability and turns the objects around him into oversized structures of control — echoing, without needing to name it outright, Baudrillard’s sense that the real has been quietly replaced by its miniature, mass-produced copy. As in Cement Eclipses, humor and irony sit close to the surface, but never far from unease — the same tension between comedy and despair that has run through the project since its beginnings, now staged not on the street but inside the frame of the gallery.
Opening reception 開幕酒會
Date: 5 Sep 2026 17:30-19:00
More info: Touch Gallery
Supported by: Consulate General of Spain in Hong Kong 西班牙駐港總領事館
Photo : Stéphane Bourgeois
Using photography and sculptures, Cordal emphasises on the double – edged concept of mass tourism. He suggests that tourists are the most effective army in history, and at some point, we are all part of an immense mass that colonises the world. We change into our vacation clothes, just to be part of the machinery called tourism. We open our suitcases in remote places, look out the window and everything becomes an immense set. We stand in huge lines under the sun to confirm that what we see is real, and corresponds to the image described in travel guides. It fills us with vitality to observe that the passage of time and nature have not yet completely overcome the vestiges of the past, and for a moment, a halo of immortality is captured on our memory cards. The terrifying thing is that these places disappear as we visit them.
26-10-2023 / 25-02-2024
