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A side-street in Mexico City, in a residential neighbourhood sprinkled with small workshops and cafés, doesn’t feel like the place to encounter an architectural paradox. Yet there it is: a four-tonne mobile, like something out of a child’s hypertrophied imagination, made of massive steel tubes with chunks of volcanic rock hanging from the ends. The contraption intersects and passes through both storeys of an art gallery: if you stand on the upper level you can see only the tubes, and in the dim-lit basement, only the rocks, suspended by steel cables that pass through holes drilled in the gallery floor. The paradox? The whole thing hangs from a single cable passing through the building’s roof, held by a crane standing in a neighbouring parking lot. The mobile is contained within the gallery without actually being supported by the building itself.

 

The mobile is part of a three-part exhibit entitled On Hospitality, by Etienne Chambaud. For most of July and August it hung at (if “at” is the right preposition for the object’s curious physical relationship to its exhibition space) Labor, a gallery in the up-and-coming Colonia Roma neighbourhood. Pamela Echeverría, a veteran curator who has worked at the state-run Carrillo Gil museum and a leading Mexican contemporary-art gallery called OMR, founded the space earlier this year.

 

Like so many such installations, the exhibit’s stated message is obscure and bland. It is about “negativity, misunderstandings and separations”. Of the mobile, subtitled ie, Exclusion, the blurb reads, it "is a mobile that doesn't fit within its own exhibition space... its totality can never be experienced... its objecthood is always challenged by the mental image it must necessarily conjure in order to exist as a whole." That might be strictly true, but is frankly boring.

 

Fortunately, a more interesting interpretation than the one the artist offers would seem to be suggested by the title, On Hospitality, and also by a second part of the exhibit, down in the basement. (The third part, consisting of jewellery pieces meant to be worn by the gallery staff, was so unobtrusive as to have no impact.) This section, subtitled The Cave of Polyphemus or The Invention of Misunderstandings, consists of a still photograph and a short film projected on to screens, dimly illuminating the hanging rocks. They depict a cave in the hills of Sicily where Mr Chambaud and his crew spent several days filming the haunting interiors.

 

The cave, like the mobile, is a paradox: at 2,800m above sea level, it is surrounded by harsh desert, but inside it is lined year-round with ice. It is also rather famous, for according to lore it was the home of the cyclops Polyphemus, where Odysseus and his companions took shelter on their way back from the Trojan war. Polyphemus returned from grazing his flocks and trapped the warriors in the cave, then started eating them. It fell to Odysseus to devise a cunning escape plan involving some wine, an improbable false name and some oversized sheep.

 

One can then read Odysseus’s trickery as the punishment for Polyphemus’s failure to honour the code of hospitality. And just as the cave is a paradox of nature, the events that transpired in it represent the paradoxical relationship between a host and his guest, one based on dependence and mistrust. The guest must rely on the host for shelter and sustenance, yet is at his mercy. The result is often a mix of gratitude and resentment.

 

Like Odysseus, the mobile finds a way to take advantage of the art space’s hospitality without becoming reliant on it. This relationship is not unlike the one between contemporary art and its institutions: art requires such official affirmation for support and recognition as art, yet must seem to break with tradition and subvert convention in order to seem worthy. 

 

Mr Chambaud, a young (only 30) Paris-based artist, may need to do a bit of work on his wall-texts. But judging from his website, On Hospitality marks a promising leap in his ambition. Ms Echeverría joined him on the trip to Sicily and recalls with a laugh but also a shudder the days spent seeking respite between the windswept desert above and the frozen cavern below: "If we had stayed up there any longer we would have gone completely crazy." Dedicating her new space to Mr Chambaud's exhibit was a daring move, but it paid off: two days before the opening, it was bought by an as-yet-unnamed private collector, who plans to re-hang it, paradoxes and all, somewhere else.