synopsis

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An attempt to print a stop-motion character skeleton

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Some really nice communicative botanical drawings I found in “A-new-Flowering” by Shirley Sherwood. Sherwood brings together 1000 years of botanical artworks. 

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A bit of Frank Miller’s delicious Holy Terror today! 

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Café Paris by Saul Leiter, 1959! 

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Behold; shots I took of the (super-fun!) Kunsthaus Graz by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier in Graz, Austria. 

The Kunsthaus Graz is an art museum in the heart of Graz showcasing contemporary art of all sorts. 

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Hey, if you are ever in Vienna, there’s an absolutely magnificent exhibition at the Josephinum, consisting of hundreds of wax-anatomical models, made in the 18th century. 

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I’ve got mixed feeling about this building. It is called the Sofitel hotel and it sits by the river in the north bank side of Vienna.  

It’s designed by Jean Nouvel, and before visiting I was really excited to see it up close. The views of the ceiling artwork (by the artist Pipilotti Rist) look amazing - in photos. 

Up close it didn’t strike me as a top quality building. It felt rushed. But I only spend thirty minutes inside (and I was only allowed to explore two floors) so, there.  

Only the last image is not mine. It was taken by the photographer Julien Lanoo for Dezeen. They made an article back in 2011 about the building. 

The Dezeen article can be found here: https://www.dezeen.com/2011/03/03/sofitel-vienna-stephansdom-by-jean-nouvel/

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I took a few photos of photographer Reiner Riedler’s WILL - The Lifesaving Machines, exhibition at the Josephinum, in Vienna. The random flashes in the fist and last images, are reflections from the room’s bulbs against the glass covering the pictures (which I kind of like!). 

It is worth visiting the Josephinum’s website to be introduced with another outstanding exhibition of anatomical wax models made in the 1780′s. 

website: http://www.josephinum.ac.at

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Moments along the railway between Graz (Austria) and Munich (Germany).

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top: Dieric Bouts, Last Supper (central panel), 1458

middle: Van Eyck, Arnolfini Wedding, 1434

bellow: David Hockney, Hitch-Hiker, Hollywood Steering Wheel, L.A. 1985

British artist David Hockney produced a wonderful documentary called Secret Knowledge, where he questions today’s historical knowledge of the sudden change in art that happened around 1400′s. Art, from flat, unrealistic depictions moved to vividly real, almost photographic, reproductions of scenes. Hockney’s clues to find the criminal that caused this shift, are: i) Artists used relatively the same canvas size when producing this new kind of art. ii) Ultra high contrast of the colours. iii) An ultra realism of materiality and surfaces. 

Hockney finds that the subjects depicted in the paintings of that shifting period had been made with correct perspective, really convincing shadows and a sense of realism in clothes and fabrics that usually wrap beautifully around forms and bodies.

He concludes that this is because the artists secretly painted using camera-obscura, deploying dark rooms and mirrors (like the one you see behind the couple in the Arnolfini Portrait by Van Eyck), before the wide-use of traditional lenses in art. 

Art historians hadn’t realised that a mirror, which was in production much before the crafting of lenses for telescopes, is also a type of lens that can capture light and project it on a surface. Hockney’s investigation altered what we knew about artists methods until today.

Essentially this means that artists traced over projections of real people, objects, fabrics, metals as they were bathed in sun light, while the artists were enclosed in a dark room working with the projection. 

In this way, artists could trace over the projection of a real object depicting it realistically without using measured perspective or relying strictly on perspectival techniques.

Now, when we look back at the Arnolfini Portrait by Van Eyck, we can safely assume that the depiction of such an intrigued object like the chandelier was probably traced over in order to achieve 100% correct perspective and amazingly realistic reflections. It’s delightfully ironic to stare into that mirror on the back wall now. 

Also! Hockney bases his reassurance of the use of mirror, not only on the fact of the perfection of perspective and colour depiction, but also on an overall glitch. The use of camera-obscura presented limitations to the size of the canvas in relation to the projection of the object outside the darkroom. So - the artists most likely collided lots of projections together, in order to create a bigger scene. (In measured perspective, when one is not using a projection of the actual object, lines can just be extended outwards to create additional measured ground -space). 

This has an uncanny effect of feeling close to every object of the scene painted. It produces a sense of dissected photographic realism. The parallel lines do not all meet at one point. “It’s a collage!” Hockney yells. As if we are constatnly looking and focusing our vision in all of the surfaces of the image at the same time. 

In his art, Hockney aims to create art as we see it. This means that his use of perspective is unconventional and thought-through. In a collage by Hockney (final image) he recreates the effect that those paintings had by connecting lots of photographs together to create the one photograph.

Each tile obeys its own perspective but the overall perspective is distorted. We are at the same time close to each individual tile of the collage. That is how we look, and we look in time, Hockney says. We scan bits of surfaces, numerous perspectives, and create the sense space in our minds. 

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Synopsis has visited Walmer Yard, a freshly built housing project in London by the Architect Peter Salter. Our senior Peter-Salter correspondent, Evripides Mytilineos, has attended the press tour and writes for us:

Peter Salter’s first built project in the UK consists of a set of four intelocking private houses.

The inner resonance of each house ariticulates a journey of craftmanship and spatial inventiveness. It could be read as a collage from Salter’s plethora of references. Often those derived from the Japanese architectural vocabulary.

In the first instance, Salter’s inner spaces are not tailored for the ‘ordinary user’. For example, often bathrooms are reconsidered as spaces extended into the ‘bedrooms’ or 'corridors’ etc.

This delivers the idea of freedom of use within these integrated spaces. It is a form of spatial evolution without definite boundaries. Kitchen areas could serve as spaces where activities such as 'reading by the sink’ or sleeping within could happen. 'Kitchen’ then, could gradually be transformed into a self-sufficient entity where inhabitation could emerge. A diversified spatial potentiality, uncertain perhaps, could be experienced-given by the user-inhabitant.

The give-and-take of sensual experience is attempted throughout, walking form outside-inside and vice-versa. The body is contained into a constant layering of readings and experiences; materials & surfaces, light & shadow, colour & reflection.

Each 'nest’ belongs and contributes to the overall architectural synthesis; yet each evolves as an autonomous entity. The overall housing footprint cloaks an asymmetrical inner courtyard; an intimate yet quiet space, communal yet protective.

In this small courtyard, in its discreet intimacy, Salter’s peculiar architectural language initiates.

Photographs + Text: Evripides Mytillineos

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OK! If you didn’t come across these images before, it is not national geographic. It is the work of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto with Dioramas. To be clear - Sugimoto photographed existing Dioramas from the AMNH. I find it hard to understand exactly how the dioramas work, but the scene you see as the background is painted. It is a meticulous reconstruction of an identical place at the origins of each species. 

It is therefore an illusion being created using grids that make it possible to reassemble space exactly as your eyes receive it. The middle-ground is staged, and right at the foreground are dead stuffed animals.  

I found a beautiful description on the magic of Sugimoto’s diorama photographs from Hans Belting and it has made me not to even attempt to write one(!): 

“In the photographs, the seam between the stage with its three-dimensional structures and the painted plane of the horizon, which seems to continue the depiction of the scene nearly perfectly, dissappears almost entirely. A similiar metamorphosis continues in the lighting, since the artificial lighting in the dioramas appears in the photograph to be natural light in the open air. Paradoxically, Sugimoto’s reproduction brings the three-dimentional image back into the reality it lost in the museum environment. That is only possible because our vision has been trained to subject media to its desires and to search for life in dead images.”

The images had been taken at the American Museum of Natural History, and the dioramas are on display there, so go have a look if you are in the US. 

Keen observers might find threads connecting the dioramas with Della Francesca paintings. I am lucky someone pointed that out to me. I posted one a few days ago! 

The book I refer to is called “Looking through Duchamp’s Door: Art and perspective in the work of Duchamp. Sugimoto. Jeff Wall.” - [highly recomended]

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Cristóbal Rojas, El Purgatorio, a depiction of purgatory, painted shortly before his death in 1890.

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Piero Della Francesca, The Flagellation of Christ. [Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino]

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- The new moon

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I very recently became aware of a Le Corbusier designed appartment for a mister Carlos De Beisteigu. If you are not aware of the (second) name, here’s what wikipedia claims: 

Don Carlos de Beistegui y de Yturbe, also known as Charles or Charlie de Beistegui, was an eccentric multi-millionaire art collector and interior decorator and one of the most flamboyant characters of mid-20th-century European life.

In the photos of his apartment, the height of the exterior walls is such so that it hides Paris, the middle ground, the action, the visual reference used by us to situate the space in context. However landmarks such as the Eiffel tower, or the Arc de Triomphe pop out of that manufactured horizon making them objects that we can not be sure of their scale, part of the surreal setting, as they are left exposed and unconnected with the city over which they stand, somehow belonging to the surrealist setting of the design.  

While walking through the park yesterday, I found myself in front of the same effect being achieved by Le Slope and its relation with the BT tower and that other thing. So there! 

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Pre-GOLEM prototype. This was shown at the B-PRO exhibition of the Bartlett school of Architecture (September, 2016).

General information about the project can be found at my previous post but it is worth visiting http://www.interactivearchitecture.org to understand how the final GOLEM was created as well as other brilliant projects from the interactive architecture cluster!