The Artist Sculpting World Cup History Out of Gum Wrappers
Lyndon Barrois's “sportraits” depict political protest, the fight for equal rights, and soccer's most iconic moments, some of which FIFA would rather forget.
LOS ANGELES — Frozen mid-leap, the soccer star Kylian Mbappé is projected onto a massive, larger-than-life screen. Upon closer inspection, the monumental image commanding the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) Resnick Pavilion is a tiny, one-inch (~2.5 cm) sculpture. Its body, carefully crafted from a Wrigley’s chewing gum wrapper, sits beneath a camera that projects its image in real time onto a screen. This installation is the work of Lyndon J. Barrois, Sr., whose solo exhibition Fútbol Is Life: Animated Sportraits is currently on view.
The show arrives in Los Angeles at a pivotal moment, with SoFi Stadium hosting FIFA World Cup matches, including a quarter-final match set to take place tomorrow, July 10. For this exhibition, Barrois recreated crucial moments from FIFA history dating back to the 1930s, illustrating events both on and off the pitch. Notably, it does not shy away from addressing the sport’s negotiations with spectacle, politics, and power. Rather than settling for the version of history captured by the camera, Barrois rebuilds it by hand and, in doing so, decides whose stories are memorialized on a monumental scale.
