Cayetano Ferrer

In a dark room at Chateau Shatto, the installation Endless Columns (all works 2014)—a carved-Styrofoam, faux–Art Deco ornament designed after a salvaged MGM Grand ashtray on which it rests—is lit with projected moving lines that trace its ziggurat-like form. Mirrors above and below the work as well as lining the walls of the room multiply the totemic shape, producing a flattened hierarchy between reflection and structure. Cayetano Ferrer, who grew up in Las Vegas and made a patchwork floor of casino carpeting for the 2012 “Made in L.A.” show at the Hammer Museum, rearranges the stylistic elements that surround gaudiness, where artifice is so accentuated and superfluous that it has become an end in itself instead of a representational device.

Another polystyrene tower, Infinite Screen Wall, stretches from floor to ceiling and is laced with green neon tubes, and as with every good fiction, it is both overarching and punctured. The work separates a pile of plaster tiles that will be restacked every day of the exhibition by the gallery staff from a series of rectangular consoles on steel bases (Quarry Composite). These pieces are part marble and part linoleum with print matched to the natural stone, layering the appearance of the thing over the thing itself, as Ferrer has in the past with street signs and billboards wrapped in the image of the horizon behind them. Ferrer’s gift is that he reconfigures not space but gilding. And maybe that is the idea behind his exaggerated illusionism—to dismantle the pretenses inherent in what presents itself as natural.