PETER HALLEY: Yes, it’s very nice to have a conversation with you, Lena. I should tell our readers that we met a few years ago in Paris and that you contributed wall texts for my installation in Venice, Heterotopia I, in 2019. Since that time, especially when we were all isolated during Covid, we have had a number of long phone conversations about my work. So our readers are stepping into a dialogue that has been going on for a long time.

P: Yes, that is really central to the way I work. I think there are two things going on in my work at the same time. On one hand, the actual internal mechanics of the work are very important to me. I have these three iconic elements. They are flat geometric shapes that rest on an uninflected flat ground. It is a very literal two-dimensional world. The shapes do not overlap to create any illusion of depth. The cells, prisons, and conduits are built up in low-relief texture so they sit on top of the canvas ground. That’s very literal as well. On the other hand, this absurdist iconography emerged from my obsession with the nature of social space in our world. I am still convinced that the space of our whole civilization is characterized by isolated terminals connected by technologically determined conduits. It dominates our physical space, our communications space, our organizational space, and our intellectual space.

P: Somehow, in forty years I haven’t gotten tired of playing with these three elements. Perhaps that’s because, to me, there is also a psychological element. To some extent, I see these prisons and cells as characters on a stage. I’m interested in how they connect or don’t connect, what kind of narratives emerge.

P: These paintings are built out of rectangular cells of different sizes, which you can think of as rooms or containers, that are squeezed side by side into a rectangular format. The paintings are very physical: each cell is a different canvas bolted to the next. They are also very tactile, since they are homogeneously covered with Roll-a-Tex to create a uniformly rough surface. There are no figure ground relationships and of course no conduits connecting the cells. As wireless connections have recently become more ubiquitous, it seems I got the idea to leave the conduits out of my paintings.

P: There is indeed a certain simplification in the elementary structure. However, when cells are staked together, they create a grid. The grid is not visible as a separate component of the composition, like in my other paintings, but it is still there. It encapsulates the cells and defines the composition. Such alchemical transformation of a cell into a grid implies an inflection of meaning, a broadening of meaning. Through this, I wanted to ironically invert the idea of simplicity.

P: I imagined a process in which cells duplicate and multiply, reinforcing their physicality. Such mechanisms – accumulation of parts, creation of masses of matter – are, in their spirit, very baroque. So your allusion to Deleuze and his baroque drapery resonates with me. I guess I wanted to see how the same mechanisms would behave, if, say, they were transposed in a modern, geometrically rigid, very Cartesian context.

P: Oh, yes. These two in particular were a kind of pastiche of Neo-Plasticism from the 1920s. I like calling them Pop-Art Mondrians. It has always been appealing to me to flirt with historical references. I am interested in parody as a creative strategy, using parody and exaggerating historical models in search of a hermetic theatricality. Ever since the 1980s, I have been drawn to Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality. It induced me to think about the contemporaneity in terms of simulation and science fiction. To paraphrase Robert Smithson, science-fiction is not about the future. It is now and it is happening.

P: I am indeed interested in the concept of time. Maybe not killing time, but playing around with it. I think artworks can either speed up time, slow it down, or take us out of time. In the 80s, I wanted to make very “fast” paintings which would impact the viewer in a very immediate way. But I also hoped that they could function halfway between a diagram and a riddle, both graspable, at least on some level, and elusive.

P: I am hoping to slow the viewer down, to engage him or her in a thorough exploration of the relationship between the three dimensional space and the two-dimensional space of the images. In these installations, I want to create complex interrelationships as viewers move through space and encounter images. Some of these encounters are planned, and some random. I hope this complexity on its own can generate puzzles and unplanned references. In 2019, I executed two conceptually interrelated installations, one taking place in Venice, the other in New York. They were named Heterotopia I and Heterotopia II, referring to Michel Foucault’s idea of heterotopia which he first wrote about in a short essay, “Espaces Autres,” in 1967.

P: Yes, I wanted to combine them all in the Venice installation! But Foucault also emphasizes that a heterotopia is a place which embraces time, that makes multiple timelines coexist. But it also remains outside of time. The very contradiction of it – of a place being time-less and time-full, moving but frozen in motion – seemed dazzling.

P: Yes, it was an architecturally orchestrated space embedded inside a 500-year-old Venetian warehouse. I invited three other artists – Lauren Clay, Andrew Kuo and RM Fischer – to participate and design their own rooms within this labyrinth. And I invited you to contribute the wall texts. If one is interested in complexity, it helps to have a polyphony of voices. Since it was Venice, the whole installation had to be packed with parodic references to European cultural history. There was a cenotaph, a broken pediment, columns galore, hieroglyphics made from digital copies of my drawings from the 1980s, and even an armillary sphere. But the images on the walls were all digitally printed and the three dimensional elements were made of flimsy wallboard, so everything became flattened and took on a virtual quality. It was like a demonic version of Disneyland, as you were saying.

P: Indeed. The cartoon-like pediment at the entrance referenced Robert Venturi’s “Mother’s House,” which is itself a suburban parody of 'the nightmare of European history,' as the saying goes. The first room reimagined a tomb of Egyptian Queen Nefertari with my 1980s line drawings reimagined as a logographic alphabet. The second room was a tribute to Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, another magnificent parodic fantasia. I first saw it right after its completion in 1979. I was living in New Orleans at a time. I was intoxicated with revisiting history, crossing timelines, reading the past from the lips of the present.

P: I have always seen in geometry a mechanism of control, the most efficient means of moving people and things. Cyberspace only seems to offer an escape from geometrization, but it reinforces Cartesian binarity and creates a constantly increasing level of abstraction. In the second half of the 20th century, the human body was reduced to numbers — a credit card number, a social security number, etc. Today, we are surveilled constantly every time we use our phones, which never leave our bodies. And the informational surplus is monetized by the mega-companies. In cyberspace one is constantly watched. Virtual bodies turn into not so virtual prisons. Plato’s formulation seems extremely relevant today.

P: In this exhibition, I wanted to see the characteristics of painting and architecture collapsed and confused. The architecture is configured to frame the paintings, but at the same time the paintings act as representations of architecture. I compose the paintings as sectional views, but they can just as easily be viewed as floor plans as well. Then, the paintings shared the materiality of the architecture in several ways. The configurations or compositions on the paintings’ surfaces are not just flat diagrams but have low relief surfaces made from the same kind of building materials used as the surface finish of the physical walls around them (stucco, sheet rock paste, etc.). At the same time, in Heterotopia II, the color palette of the paintings was also transferred onto the walls, beams, floor, and staircases that define the physical space — a simple way to further blur the boundary between the representation of the space and the physical space.

P: I was invited by Renos Xippas to do a straightforward show of seven paintings, in contrast to my complicated installation in 2018. They were made in 2020 and 2021, and continue the ideas that you described beginning with my New York show in 2019. I don’t think they are all dancing, but instability seems to be the theme here. They are all still balanced on a stable horizontal pediment, but mist of them look like they could fall over in one direction or another. I guess I wanted to reproduce a sense that we are on shaky ground. It is also an opportunity to play around with the structure and propose a mosaical vision of reality. The paintings are made of cells and prisons, each of which inhabits its own space juxtaposed with the next. I hope they create a constantly changing puzzle. In the older compositions, there are still a few conduits, but as we discussed, they are on the way out. I like to think that there is also an alchemical dimension to my paintings. A friend of mine mentioned that they incorporate an idea of magical transformation, as each element morphs into its opposite. A cell is not only a prison, but also a refuge or a fortress in which one may recharge him or herself. Confinement turns into openness, since there are always channels of communication flowing into the cells, whether they are visible or not. Rigidity of structure results in symbolic flexibility. I was always trying to access the symbolic and to forge variable meaning through more or less constant, invariable forms.

P: Oh, I think all my work responds to at least one aspect of the pandemic, how people became physically isolated but connected by means of predetermined technological pathways. Sometimes I think this entire societal trend by which we have become isolated in front of your computers or phones was precipitated by some primal human fear of contagion and plague. Everyone alive today is the offspring of those who survived the myriad plagues that have decimated humanity over the millennia.

P: I have revisited his writings recently, notably his discussion of the development of strategies quarantine which he claims were more or less the foundational principle of urban planning in the modern era. Foucault advances the interesting idea that natural law theory imagines a state of nature to speak about an ideal law system, while a governor hopes for a pandemic in order to create a perfect state. A plague becomes an opportunity to unravel the “mess”, a way to structure reality through geometry, reinforcing surveillance and social control.