Once the work goes out of my studio, it finds new contexts and meanings in viewers’ minds. It’s fascinating to hear what they see. Last March, I enjoyed an architect, Saurabh Vaidya’s blog post that showed the work through his rich, investigative mind. He just posted his second entry on the work. Here are his 1st and the 2nd entry posted back to back:
I came across works by two very interesting artists last week, Nicolas Moulin who envisages ruins of mega monolithic concrete blocks in a deserted landscape while the other being Hiroyuki Hamada who designs comparatively small, vaguely futurist looking monoliths.
(Some of the many Hiroyuki’s tablets that could easily come to be a parts of totem pole of a dystopian space age civilization, whose technological advancement has come at the price of erosion of memory of history and language…where technology is god. Images sourced from: http://acidolatte.blogspot.com/2010/02/hiroyuki-hamada.html?zx=883872d53fad4dd5)
Hiroyuki’s artifacts that seem to draw semantic nourishment from manga, minimalism, space debris, Japanese Zen, Buddhism, God particles, Shivalingam, crustaceans, Mars and brush by closely to Nicolas’s Béton Brut work that sends roots to Normandy Bunkers, Corbusier, Oplismeno skirodema, Berlin Wall, Moai, Rosetta stone, Noah’s Arc etc according to me are not thriving on but are just the opposite. They are soil samples of the very ground that anchors the tree of Being, from where all these references germinate.
(Images of Nicolas Moulin’s collages sourced from Vulgare one can also find an online blog recording by the artist and Amanda Crawley Jackson called Beton brut)
The ability of both these artist to have art works that spread roots through history and simultaneously come across as being so basic that it forms a part of Lebenswelt, the very ground of universality which anchors the roots of metaphysics, to be understood in equal ways by every member of the human race is according to me the true essence of their work.
Scale, texture and form, that is all to it, as wise old university stalwarts would put it, which according to me has more truth to it than the combined cacophony that we seem to have inherited from the circus that was post modernism and these two artists working independently in different circles and continents seem to echo just that. The simplicity of works is refreshing and it just looks very very sexy.
Lebenswelt appeared at Urban Floop on Sundy, March 28, 2010
Here is his second post:
During my early days in architecture all of us during a brief phase had taken to worshipping Tadao Ando, which secretly we still do in some obscure corner of naivety unpolluted by the realisation that it cannot be that simple, life is far more complicated, filled with contradictions that need to be represented in our spaces, objects, skews and corners. Ando had been popular for quite sometime then but it was during my first year in Architecture that he built Church of the Light a building that worshipped space, made concrete an inch more beautiful than what the modernist had left it as and we drooled.
It is this rich simplicity that draws me to Hiroyuki’s work of which I have written before. Hiroyuki will be exhibiting three new pieces in his next show at Art Sites, a gallery in Riverhead, NY. If you are the lucky few around do visit…I personally would like to see the scale of these objects…and if they open up like loosely held 3d jigsaw puzzles, or do they crack like egg shells, are they hollow or filled with a heavy fluid, is there a temperature difference in the blacks and whites, browns and greys…I guess I will definitely be banned from entering the gallery or his workshop!
I hope the art work sells and and pray definitely not to clients who would use it as bourgeoisie conversational props with their boring guests in plush living rooms with matching minimal aesthetics.
Hiroyuki appeared at Urban Floop on Saturday, August 14, 2010
