Bruce Catalano’s Figurative Sculptures That Vanish In Space

For his “Travelers” series, French artist Bruno Catalano sculpts human figures that contain missing pieces. Many of his bronze sculptures are missing a good portion of their torsos, asking the viewer to visually complete the sculptures using the space that surrounds them. The effect of his work varies with the location – a viewer could fill in the figures’ gaps with a variety of images the depend on the sculptures’ surrounding space, from the gallery to the park. Catalano creates an optical illusion, confronting the viewer with an image of impossibility that turns into intrigue. As a former sailor, Catalano has always been interested in the figure of the traveler. He says,

“I have travelled a lot and I left Morocco when I was 12 years old. I felt that a part of me was gone and will never come back. From years of being a sailor, I was always leaving different countries and places each time and it’s a process that we all go through. I feel like this occurs several times during life and of course everyone has missing pieces in his or her life that he wont find again. So the meaning can be different for everyone, but to me the sculptures represent a world citizen.”

Ten of Catalano’s sculptures can be found at the Port of Marseilles. (via the daily mail)

Bruce Catalano’s Figurative Sculptures That Vanish In Space appeared first on Beautiful/Decay Artist & Design.

http://www.modernism.ro/2014/03/10/bruce-catalanos-figurative-sculptures-that-vanish-in-space/

Crayon Carved Sculptures by Hoang Tran

California artist Hoang Tran creates amazingly intricate crayon sculptures of characters from popular fiction like Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Miyazaki movies, Doctor Who, Adventure Time, and more. Some of the crayon sculptures are available to purchase online at Etsy, and Tran also takes custom orders. Visit his Tumblr blog for more photos of Tran’s awesome work.

images via Hoang Tran

via Design Fetish, Archie McPhee

http://www.modernism.ro/2014/01/16/crayon-carved-sculptures-by-hoang-tran/

Matthew Rolston Creates Human-Like Portraits Of Ventriloquist Dummies

Commercial photographer Matthew Rolston had built a career on entertainment portraiture, advertising, and music videos until 2009, the year in which he started venturing off his usual gigs.

“My professional work is subject to tremendous agendas; everything I do is mediated by a group of people, even the creative work is usually mentioned in a contract.

His next project became something more fun, with a bit more creative freedom, and a lack of human subjects. Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits, a 224-page book, features more than 50 portraits of Ventriloquist dummies from then Vent Haven Museum. Rolston uses his commercial skills, a rather formal photographic approach, to create human-like portraits of these creepy yet endearing dolls. The photographer re-appropriates techniques from his past in order to create a “personal response to the emanations of humanity that come from these terribly evocative inanimate objects.”

“By employing the same techniques and emotional approach I would apply to a human subject, I believe I was able to portray these figures in much the same way. … For me these figures have a yearning quality. They speak through their eyes, since their voices—voices of their ventriloquists—are now long silent. I found them to be endearing, hilarious, tragic, even disturbing—sometimes all at once.”

(via Slate and Brown Paper Bag)

Matthew Rolston Creates Human-Like Portraits Of Ventriloquist Dummies appeared first onBeautiful/Decay.

http://www.modernism.ro/2014/01/17/matthew-rolston-creates-human-like-portraits-of-ventriloquist-dummies/

Henrique Oliveira plays with Palais de Tokyo’s architecture

Creating a spectacular and invasive Gordian Knot, Henrique Oliveira plays with Palais de Tokyo’s architecture, allowing a work that combines the vegetal and the organic to emerge. The building itself becomes the womb that produces this volume of “tapumes” wood, a material used in Brazilian towns to construct the wooden palisades that surround construction sites.

In the form of paintings, sculptures or installations, the hybrid art of Henrique Oliveira (b. 1973, lives and works in São Paulo) evokes both the urban and the vegetable, the organic and the structural, as well as art and science, through compositions in which the unexpected generates a universe tinted with the fantastic.

Graduating from the University of São Paulo in 1997, the artist explores fluidity, the combination and color of materials, which endows his installations with a certain pictorial quality. Oliveira often borrows materials from the Brazilian urban landscape, notably tapumes, wood taken from fences surrounding and blocking access to construction sites. By using these materials, Oliveira highlights the endemic and parasitic nature of these constructions; evoking wooden tumors, his installations function as a metaphor for the favelas’ organic growth, thus revealing the dynamic decay of São Paulo’s urban fabric. In the artistic lineage of Lydia Clark or Hélio Oiticica, he uses the very context of this sprawling city as a raw material. The way in which it is treated, as well as its unexpected apparition, destabilizes the visitor’s perception of space.

Through a kind of architectural anthropomorphism, Henrique Oliveira reveals the building’s structure. At Palais de Tokyo, he plays on the space’s existing and structuring features, prolonging and multiplying pillars in order to endow them with a vegetable and organic dimension, as though the building were coming alive. The artist draws inspiration from medical textbooks, amongst others, and particularly from studies of physical pathologies such as tumors. Through a formal analogy, these outgrowths evoke the outermost layers of the bark of a common tree. The texture of this wooden tapumes installation inevitably calls to mind certain tree essences from Amazonian, humid tropical forests: the rivulets and other nodes constitute uncontrollable networks, in a logic that Man can no longer suppress.

CURATOR
Marc Bembekoff is currently a curator of the Palais de Tokyo (where he organized Damir Očko and Dewar & Gicquel’s solo exhibitions, amongst others), as well as an independent curator (“The Mystery Spot,” at the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard in Paris, 2012; “Du monde clos à l’univers infini” at the Quartier in Quimper, 2012) and a co-founder of the collective Le Bureau/. He has contributed to several monographic publications (Bettina Samson, Nicolas Boulard, etc.) and exhibition catalogues (musée Rodin, Freud Museum, etc.).

The installation will be in view through September 9th, 2013. Photos by André Morin. (via dark silence in suburbia)

http://www.modernism.ro/2013/07/23/henrique-oliveira-plays-with-palais-de-tokyos-architecture/

Delightful Papercraft Food & Grocery Sculptures

These delightful papercraft foods and groceries were created by artist Maria Laura Benavente Sovieri for advertising and editorial clients. For more of her photography and visual art, check out her Behance portfolio.

via Ian Brooks

http://www.modernism.ro/2013/11/03/delightful-papercraft-food-grocery-sculptures/

Architectural Shell Sculptures for Hermit Crabs

Japanese artist Aki Inomata created a variety of architectural shells for hermit crabs for her 2009-2010 sculpture series “Why Not Hand Over a ‘Shelter’ to Hermit Crabs?” Inomata made the shell sculptures out of translucent plastic using rapid manufacturing techniques. Some shells have houses sprouting out of them, others feature entire cityscapes. Hermit crabs have willingly inhabited the shells, in some cases choosing them over natural shells.

via designboom

http://www.modernism.ro/2013/07/26/architectural-shell-sculptures-for-hermit-crabs/

Henrique Oliveira plays with Palais de Tokyo’s architecture

Creating a spectacular and invasive Gordian Knot, Henrique Oliveira plays with Palais de Tokyo’s architecture, allowing a work that combines the vegetal and the organic to emerge. The building itself becomes the womb that produces this volume of “tapumes” wood, a material used in Brazilian towns to construct the wooden palisades that surround construction sites.

In the form of paintings, sculptures or installations, the hybrid art of Henrique Oliveira (b. 1973, lives and works in São Paulo) evokes both the urban and the vegetable, the organic and the structural, as well as art and science, through compositions in which the unexpected generates a universe tinted with the fantastic.

Graduating from the University of São Paulo in 1997, the artist explores fluidity, the combination and color of materials, which endows his installations with a certain pictorial quality. Oliveira often borrows materials from the Brazilian urban landscape, notably tapumes, wood taken from fences surrounding and blocking access to construction sites. By using these materials, Oliveira highlights the endemic and parasitic nature of these constructions; evoking wooden tumors, his installations function as a metaphor for the favelas’ organic growth, thus revealing the dynamic decay of São Paulo’s urban fabric. In the artistic lineage of Lydia Clark or Hélio Oiticica, he uses the very context of this sprawling city as a raw material. The way in which it is treated, as well as its unexpected apparition, destabilizes the visitor’s perception of space.

Through a kind of architectural anthropomorphism, Henrique Oliveira reveals the building’s structure. At Palais de Tokyo, he plays on the space’s existing and structuring features, prolonging and multiplying pillars in order to endow them with a vegetable and organic dimension, as though the building were coming alive. The artist draws inspiration from medical textbooks, amongst others, and particularly from studies of physical pathologies such as tumors. Through a formal analogy, these outgrowths evoke the outermost layers of the bark of a common tree. The texture of this wooden tapumes installation inevitably calls to mind certain tree essences from Amazonian, humid tropical forests: the rivulets and other nodes constitute uncontrollable networks, in a logic that Man can no longer suppress.

CURATOR
Marc Bembekoff is currently a curator of the Palais de Tokyo (where he organized Damir Očko and Dewar & Gicquel’s solo exhibitions, amongst others), as well as an independent curator (“The Mystery Spot,” at the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard in Paris, 2012; “Du monde clos à l’univers infini” at the Quartier in Quimper, 2012) and a co-founder of the collective Le Bureau/. He has contributed to several monographic publications (Bettina Samson, Nicolas Boulard, etc.) and exhibition catalogues (musée Rodin, Freud Museum, etc.).

The installation will be in view through September 9th, 2013. Photos by André Morin. (via dark silence in suburbia)

http://www.modernism.ro/2013/07/23/henrique-oliveira-plays-with-palais-de-tokyos-architecture/

Hand-Cut Paper Microorganisms Sculptures

For his hand-cut paper and acrylic sculptures, Charles Clary envisions a strange biology where viral colonies expand across the walls of his studio in fluorescent, geometric formations. The artist (whom we interviewed on the blog in 2010) currently has a solo show at Brett Wesley Gallery in Las Vegas that comes to a close this Saturday, September 28. Clary’s work is precise and labor-intensive; the artist routinely puts in months of consecutive 12 hours days of cutting the thin layers that make up his voluminous pieces.

http://www.modernism.ro/2013/10/16/hand-cut-paper-microorganisms-sculptures/