Bruno Munari: Presenza Degli Antenati, 1970

Presenza Degli Antenati, 1970
Presence of the Ancestors

“When my grandmother Luigia would see a newborn baby, she would look him over and then, without taking her eyes off him, would say his nose is like his mother’s, his eyes are like his father’s, but his expression is like Aunt Bernarda’s who lives in Verona and never visits anymore; his ears are like your grandfather’s, his mouth is like my sister Kim’s. The baby would smile and my grandmother would continue: his smile is like your uncle’s whom we haven’t seen since he left town years ago and now works (or so he claims) in Australia, but we haven’t heard a thing from him in ages.

In other words, in a heterozygote, when the gametes are formed through a pair of alleles, half of the gametes contain one of the two alleles, the other half the other allele. According to the second law of Mendel, then, the alleles separate during meiosis, going off into different gametes. Thus the phenotypic division derives from the casual combination of gametes.”

-Pg 262, Far vedere l’aria, Bruno Munari, Air Made Visible, A Visual Reader on Bruno Munari

Bruno Munari: Macchina Inutile

Munari’s Useless Machines are made of painted cardboard and held together with silk threads.

“The elements of a useless machine, by contrast, all rotate upon and within themselves without touching. They are geometric in origin and exploit the two sides of their rotating elements to create chromatic variations. The public often asks how this idea came to me. This is my response: in 1933 the first abstract paintings were made in Italy; they were nothing more than geometric forms painted in a realistic manner. Morandi, it was said, made abstract pictures using bottles and vases as a formal pretext. In fact, the subject of a picture by Morandi is not the bottles but the painting captured in those spaces. So, it didn’t matter whether he painted bottles or triangles – it was all the same – and the painting was born from the formal and chromatic relationship between the elements that made up the work”

– Pg 40, Useless Machines, Far vedere l’airia, Bruno Munari, Air Made Visible, A Visual Reader on Bruno Munari.

Bruno Munari: Drawings of Faces

Drawings from Bruno Munari’s Design As Art (1966)

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Look Into My Eyes by Bruno Munari

An exercise in seeing the world through the eyes of others. This artist’s book, first published in 1969 as a gift, contains 25 loose colored cards centered around the theme of faces. The pages can be mixed up as to vary their order and clustered into small groups to change the color of the eyes, turning Bruno Munari’s book the into a game of perspective. –Exile Books

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I like the way faces are being presented in Munari’s work. The drawings from his book Design as Art could be a useful exercise to get me started with the creation of masks. Look into My Eyes on the other hand is a great way to present these masks in a book format. They have elements of interactivity as well, with each of them having die cuts of eyes and mouths. These elements of the faces remains constant while the faces change and when layered, the eyes could change colour. I find this book so simple yet brilliant.

Picasso’s Ceramics

Takeaway: Picasso’s ceramics are very peculiar and stylised. Almost all are depictions of faces but necessarily in a naturalistic way. Picasso was known for using multiple perspective during his cubist phase. He was had interests in African masks, which were popular amongst European painters during the impressionist movement. It certainly shows through his work, the use of multiple perspective and the interest in masks and the face. This could be a medium I could explore.

Dali’s Mustache by Salvador Dalí, Philippe Halsman

With 101 Life magazine covers to his credit, Philippe Halsman (1906-1979) was one of the leading portrait photographers of his time. In addition to his distinguished career in photojournalism, Halsman was one of the great pioneers of experimental photography, motivated by a profound desire to push this youngest of art forms toward new frontiers by using innovative and unorthodox photographic techniques. One of Halsman’s favorite subjects was Salvador Dali, the glittering and controversial painter and theorist with whom the photographer shared a unique friendship and extraordinary professional collaboration that spanned over thirty years. Whenever Dali imagined a photograph so strange that its production seemed impossible, Halsman tried to find the solution, and invariably succeeded. As Halsman explains in his postface, Dali’s Mustache is the fruit of this marriage of the minds. The jointly conceived and seemingly nonsensical questions and answers reveal the gleeful humor and assumed cynicism for which Dali is famous, while the marvelous and inspired images of Dali’s mustache brilliantly display Halsman’s consumate skill and extraordinary inventiveness as a photographer. This combination of wit, absurdity, and the off-handedly profound is irresistible and has contributed to the enduring fascination inspired by this unique photographic interview, which has become a cult classic and valuable collector’s item since its original publication in 1954. The present volume faithfully reproduces the first edition and will introduce a new generation to the irreverent humor and imaginative genius of two great artists. – Goodreads Takeaway: These photographs by Philippe Halsman of Dali captures the very essence of the artist. Dali is almost distinguishable via his famous mustache, it is as if his mustache is a manifestation of himself. Like what I have read in E.H Gombrich’s essay, masks could stand for “crude distinctions, the deviations from the norm which mark a person off  from others.” which is exactly what Dali’s mustache is. It epitomises him. The last work which is of a mobile does not need Dali’s face but just representations of his face. It also supports what I read in Gombrich’s essay about the displacement of facial features, no matter how we rearrange them, they still are distinguishable.

Oliver Jeffers – Dipped Paintings

HERE OR THERE is predominately a portraiture exhibition, a space where Oliver Jeffers takes an anthropological approach in rendering subjects of various religious and ethnographic backgrounds. Diverging from his well-known illustration work for children’s picture books, Jeffers explores the chasm between logic thought and emotional impulse.

In a departure from his previous work that ropes in mathematical equations as a method to unravel the traditional portraiture conventions, in HERE OR THERE social satire and elements of the fantastic combine to create subjective renderings of the modern day condition. In a nice curatorial flourish, the artist himself handwrites the artwork titles and various quotes around the exhibition in chalk on the blackboard painted walls at Gestalten Space.

One of Jeffers’ approaches to portraiture that I would have enjoyed seeing more examples of were his paint-dipped works. In Without A Doubt Part I, a bust portrait of an Asian lady is obscured from the chin down by black paint that the artist has dipped the work in, gilt gold frame and all.

– Berlin Art Link

Takeaway: Jeffers used dipped paint to cover a portrait of a woman partially. This somehow arouses more interest as we wonder what the woman actually look like, what is behind the dipped paint. Does covering up conceals who she really is or do our interpretation of her makes her who she is?

For Light and Memory – Painting and Collage by Sergei Sviatchenko

This is an interesting technique where the face is being cut out and you can literally see right through them. Perhaps the face is only a veneer that when removed, it could possible reveal so much more.

Drawing on and harnessing all of the cultural tides he has experienced in 40 years of image-making, Sviatchenko’s oeuvre spans the known and the unimaginable. It cuts through the boundaries of traditional and contemporary visuals to merge pop culture with politics, personal memory with collective histories, and architecture and science with the logic of dreams.

For several years now, Sergei Sviatchenko has produced photo-collages that look like his own and no one else’s. A Sviatchenko piece may consist of only two or three interlinked elements floating on a vividly colored background of blue, yellow, green or pink. One of his periodic series is titled Less and reduction is his unfailing aim. The fewer the images, the more the pressure on each component increases, and the more crucial the acts of selection, excision and montage become, since everything depends on the associations and implications forced from this relationship. The flatness of the backgrounds is jarring and unusual; many collagists prefer to set their images into delicate beds of paper that can be savored for their colors and texture. Sviatchenko’s harshly bright and depthless backdrops deny his images any sense of location and push his constructions forward graphically as sculptural objects. The sharp cuts that he makes around, and into, his often monochrome source pictures give them a blunt, aggressive, anti-realist outline that helps to counteract the otherwise overpowering color. The final outcome is a limited edition C-print, which further flattens the image.

–Design Observer

Despite the disquieting intimations of violence, exploitation and control as the image grapples with itself, this “elephant man” exists first of all to fulfill the collagist’s desire to make another world from the chaotic visual debris of a planet in a state of permanent flux. All Sviatchenko will add is that reconfigurations of this kind create a new “story” in which viewers must discover their own associations: “Then everyone can look for their own reality.”

Takeaway: These collages by Sviatchenko are not overwhelming in terms of the use of elements, instead he uses a few pieces, more often two to three and creating a tight composition that is well balanced. The use of bright solid colours as the background elevates the collage pieces. I am especially interested in the portraits that he did via collage. Displacing the face, it is as if, the more you cover it, the more you are revealing. Not in a literal sense but more of a symbolic sense.

James Ensor: The Painter of Masks

Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888), James Ensor

Very sensitive to criticism, Ensor appeared hurt, disappointed and despairing after the Salon des XX in 1887 and his confrontation with Seurat’s enormous painting. During that same year, he had to cope with the deaths of his father and his grandmother, to whom he was very attached. These events had a profound effect on Ensor and led to a turning point in his career.

From 1887, images of masks and skeletons, already present throughout his work since 1883, became prominent. He even went back to some of his works from the early 1880s to add in these motifs.

Masks and skeletons of course recalled the strange atmosphere of the family shop as well as the Carnival tradition of Ostend, but they also had a symbolic meaning. Masks concealed and heightened a reality that the painter found too ugly and too cruel, while skeletons pointed to the vanity and absurdity of the world. 

In 1888, Ensor tackled the monumental Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (2,52 x 4,3 m., Los Angeles, The Paul Getty Museum), his response to Seurat’s painting and to the detractors of his work. This painting blends all the principles of Ensor’s art: light that intensifies the most vivid colours, the desire for modernity that places Christ in 19th century Brussels, a city torn by conflicting political movements, and masks that confuse reality, the very apotheosis of the painter. Ensor gave his own features to Christ entering Brussels, as if sacrificing his life and his peace of mind to painting.

At the same time as working on his programmatic painting, Ensor took his revenge for the attacks directed at him, with a series of virulent panels, engravings and drawings denouncing the injustices of his time as well as expressing his own petty concerns. The viciousness and lack of constraint of these works were unequalled in these final years of the century.
– Musée d’Orsay

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Masks Confronting Death (1888), James Ensor

Ensor had been surrounded by masks all his life.His parents ran a souvenir shop in the seaside town of Ostend, Belgium, where they displayed masks, puppets, chinoiseries, sea- shells, and similar curiosities, all of which caught the imagination of the young Ensor and subsequently ap- peared in his paintings. In addition, Ensor participated in the extravagant carnivals of Ostend and Brussels, and the masked and costumed revelers impressed him strongly. He saw with clarity the difference between the pretences of carnival and the realities of human existence.

By 1888 he felt no necessity for the human presences and realistic settings of his earlier compositions with masks; he had developed the mask into an effective carrier of meaning within an imaginary pictorial world.

In Masks Confronting Death, five masked merrymakers are shown half- length in the foreground beneath a luminous sky, cluster- ing around the costumed figure of Death in a symbolic confrontation. The masks have a shocking intensity. One has unnaturally wide, staring eyes, others grotesquely shaped noses and senselessly grinning mouths, one a flamelike topknot of blue hair

Although masks usually transform or conceal the wearer, these masks of Ensor’s seem instead to gather into themselves all the malignities of the beings they purport to disguise. Their grotesqueness seems a physical manifestation of a deformed human soul beneath. They reveal Ensor’s view of humankind, with its weaknesses and cruelties. He feels no compassion for these distorted creatures; his own bitter encounters with a family who plagued him and with art critics who ridiculed his work left him no tolerance for human folly.

Much of the shock of these masked presences is due to Ensor’s use of color. The shimmering pastels of sky, and some costumes and hats, show the influence of the luminous palettes of Watteau, Turner,and the Impressionists, and perhaps of the nacreous colorings of the marine creatures Ensor painted at Ostend. But for the masks and the rest of the costumes Ensor has used bold expressionistic colour,crudely applied vivid red, bright blue,and brilliant shiny pinks for the faces, set against the harsh red, yellow, and green and the vulgar iridescences of carnival costumes. These bold colors violate the softer colors in his canvas, and become in themselves a metaphor for the violence Ensor sees in the masks, and in mankind.

Death too is a frequent inhabitant of Ensor’s pictorial world. As the masks reveal what men are, Death shows what they shall become. With sardonic humor Ensor sends him among the masqueraders, denying them the escape from reality that they seek in their revels.

A fantastical figure, prominent in his shimmering white robe against the colored garments of the crowd, Death wears an elaborate and disturbingly organic-looking hat, with a yellow flower clinging to it. Although the revelers are gathered around him, it is possible that in their folly they have not yet recognized him as other than a cos- tumed carnivalfigure likethemselves. The loose shoulders of his robe and the downturned hatbrim shield his face from their scrutiny. The cowering figure at the far left, seeming to gnaw on the cloak of the figure in front of him in his fright, may understand the seriousness of the en- counter, and his fear is echoed inthe disembodied, ghostly features in blue in the mists above his head. The viewer, for his part, is certainly not misled; the skull stares directly out of the picture, the gray-brown color of decay, drawing him into the circle of those under Death’s power.

– Cynthia Johnson, Ensor’s “Masks Confronting Death”, MoMA, No. 5 (Autumn, 1975), p. 3