Whilst the works on display – as a result of their reworking and decontextualising – may have shed their original functions, they have now become sculptural objects with a distinctive presence. They are occasionally reminiscent of Gordon Matta-Clark’s heroic gestures in deconstructing houses and factory buildings, sometimes of John Chamberlain’s car body sculptures and Donald Judd’s minimalist fetish for aluminium, of Rosemarie Trockel’s psycho-socially charged objects, or the archaeological finesse of Cyprien Gaillard’s installations.
The works in adopted are both cultural relicts and objects that may be considered within the history of art. Pirgelis has succeeded in extending Conceptual Art’s long history by means of a highly specific sensibility and the radical position he has adopted.

A notable aspect of this position is its narrative strength. This contributes enormously to the objects’ auratic charge. The works on show succeed in revealing the suppressed fears which are often unconsciously associated with flying, even though for many of us it has become part of our everyday experience. Pirgelis’ reworking of found paraphernalia in earlier exhibitions already drew attention to the cultural compensation mechanisms of fashion, glamour, and high style, which for a long time were required to distract people from their fear of flying. In adopted, a silkscreen print of a Pan Am publicity photo showing the well-known Spanish-French clown and former international star Charlie Rivel, provides a good illustration of such a scenario. In the photo, staged as high comedy, Rivel seems to be thanking heaven that he has safely arrived on the ground already while descending the stairs of the plane. In addition, Pirgelis repeatedly returns, in his sculptural works, to the dream of flying, one that perhaps will soon be a thing of the past. The “recycled” materials in his works tangibly address the anxieties linked to air travel in an era of diminishing resources, oil crises, terror attacks, global recession, and climate change.

In terms of cultural history flying has always been understood as the epitome of human hubris – an activity which was accompanied by the possible threat of divine retribution. The works in adopted are distinctive in their mixing of the archaic with high technology, of vulnerability with strength, transforming the notion of hubris into an almost physical experience. That objects of such a scale, such weight, and such fragility are able to overcome gravity, to convey humans safely through the earth’s atmosphere, inevitably challenges the limits of the viewer’s imagination. Perhaps Benjamin was thinking of precisely this feeling of precariousness, or even the magical, when he coined his term aura.