“The Great Ruins of Saturn”

The architetturati descended upon Storefront for Art and Architecture Saturday evening for the opening of the exhibition Alvaro Urbano: The Great Ruins of Saturn. Transforming the gallery into a cavernous theater for shadow puppetry, Alvaro Urbano, an artist and professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, has created an installation and film which reimagine the iconic New York State Pavilion of the 1964 World’s Fair designed by Philip Johnson, still standing today in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens.

Entering the curtained space presents whirling shadows of grotesquely rendered mid-century symbols. In an inversion of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, they become the tool to question, as the wall text says, “the spectacle of ‘man’s achievements …progress, optimism, power,’” that the pavilion symbolized upon its completion, speculating instead on alternatives which “escape the shadows formed by the still-thriving promises of a techno-capitalist future.”

Fittingly, the opening continued past sunset, extending the shadowy environment of the i…