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.