Month: November 2015

David Letellier, “Catan”

David Letellier, “Catan”, Kinetic Sound Installation, Saint Sauveur Chapel in Caen, France

By a symbolic mirror effect, the curves of the wires, created by the gravitational force, reflect the shapes of the church arches. Caten opposes the ephemeral to the eternal, the movement to the static, and produce a tension between the lightness and the millenary stability of the space. The sound composition is inspired by the medieval solmisation prayers, especially the first verse of “Ut Queant Laxis”, also known as the “hymn to St John the Baptist”, used in the eleventh century to determine the names of the notes of the scale used in latin countries.

At each turn, the engines emit one of the first 4 notes of the scale (Ut, Re, Mi, Fa), creating a sequence of intervals, constantly reconfigured. Low frequencies resonate in the space and emphasize the transcendental character of a place once dedicated to faith. The name is derived from the term catenary, which describes the plane curve formed by a rope hanging between two points.

Created for the Saint Sauveur chapel in Caen, Caten is a levitating sculpture, determined by gravity and guiding the evolution of a sound composition. 300 fine wires suspended from two ropes, connected themselves at each end to a slowly rotating arm, form an evanescent surface which interacts with the architecture.

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)

Chateau des Maures

The Stoneworks at Chateau des Maures

The Chateau des Maures, also known as the Castle of the Moors, in the Extremadura, is situated in the town of Sintra, in the parish (Freguesia) of São Pedro de Penaferrim, in the council Sintra district in Lisbon, in Portugal. It is now classified as a National Monument, part of the Sintra Cultural Landscape, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The castle is an irregularly planned military outpost that follows a 450 metre perimeter on top of a mountainous cliff, oriented southwest to northwest. It consists of a double line of military walls that meanders over the granite terrain of the promontory. Its place on the hilltop, surrounded by and including the natural and exotic vegetation, accentuates the Romantic character of the place.

The outer walls open near Abelheira (west of Tapada dos Bichos), from a main access door, where several paths wind around the hilltop of the castle. A second ring of walls reinforces the castle with both circular and square turrets, thick wall battlements and railings, and crowned with pyramid-shaped merlons. At this second wall is the main entrance to the castle, protected by two turrets and battlements.

Ben Winshaw

Artists Unknown, “Ben Winshaw”, Computer Graphics, Film Gifs

Proclaimed by many critics as one of the best young actors of his generation, Benjamin John Whishaw was born in Clifton, Bedfordshire. Ben attended Samuel Whitbread Community College where his interest in theatre grew and he became a member of the Bancroft Players Youth Theatre at Hitchin’s Queen Mother Theatre. During his time there he rose to prominence in many productions, most notabl “If This Is a Man”, based on the book of the same name by Primo Levi, a survivor of Nazi World War II prisoner of war camp. The play was taken to the Edinburgh Festival in 1995 where it garnered five-star reviews and great critical acclaim with Ben Whishaw getting rave reviews for his portrayal of Levi.

Whishaw played in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) as Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a perfume maker whose craft turns deadly getting raves once again for his stunning portrayal. Whishaw appeared in 2007’s I’m Not There. (2007) as one of the Bob Dylan reincarnations and in 2008 in Criminal Justice (2008) a TV series. He also appeared in the films The Tempest (2010) and Bright Star (2009).

Ben Winshaw entered into a civil partnership with his partner Mark Bradshaw in August 2012. They met on the set of Bright Star (2009).

Henrique Oliveira

Henrique Oliveira, “Transarquitetônica”

Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira completed work on his largest installation to date titled “Transarquitetônica” at Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade in São Paulo. As with much of his earlier sculptural and installation work the enormous piece is built from tapumes, a kind of temporary siding made from inexpensive wood that is commonly used to obscure construction sites. Oliveira uses the repurposed wood pieces as a skin nailed to an organic framework that looks intentionally like a large root system. Because the space provided by the museum was so immense, the artist expanded the installation into a fully immersive environment where viewers are welcome to enter the artwork and explore the cavernous interior.

Julien Salaud

Autoprotraits by Julien Salaud

Through his practice Julien Salaud questions the links, forces and symbolism that unite man with nature. He is equally interested in the survival of animal and plant species that are currently disappearing and in the manufacture of celestial creatures, chimera formed from birds and insects. Therefore he composes a magic bestiary – that allows us to confront a return to the powerful and mysterious reign of animals. In the artist’s own words, each of his works offers “a different point of view regarding what an animal can be (that of the Cartesian or the geneticist, the predator or the prey, the sorcerer or the mystic)”.

Olafur Eliasson, “Infinite Staircase”, 2004, Munich, Germany

Olafur Eliasson is a Danish-Icelandic artist known for sculptures and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience. In 1995 he established Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, a laboratory for spatial research. Olafur represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and later that year installed The Weather Project in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London.

Completed in 2004, “Umschreibung (Rewriting)” is a surreal spiral steel staircase built by Danish-Icelandic artist, Olafur Eliasson. The staircase resides permanently in the courtyard of the global accounting firm KPMG in Munich.

Julien Salaud

Sculptures and Installations by Julien Salaud

In Julien Salaud’s work there is a whole pantheon filled with animals depicted in different ways, such as drawing, etching and sculpture. It is generally accepted that his work examines the connections between man and animal. That is indeed one side of his work, but transformation is really the core of it: wood animals skins or insects turning into something else with additional beads, nails, feathers or rhinestone.

Over the last year, French artist Julien Salaud has installed several new works as part of his “Stellar Cave” series involving elaborate thread drawings illuminated by ultraviolet light. The polygonal depictions of people, animals, and zoomorphic figures are meant to evoke the idea of star constellations with allusions to mythology and mysticism. Salaud works with cotton thread coated in ultraviolet paint wrapped around precisely placed nails on ceilings or gallery walls. One of his largest installations, Stellar Cave IV, was recently on view at the Hezliya Museum of Contemporary Art.

Julien Salaud lives and works in Orléans – France. He is represented by Suzanne Tarasiève art gallery in Paris.

Herman Melville: “In What Rapt Ether Sails the World”

Photographer Unknown, (The Torn White T-Shirt)

“There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:–through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’s doubt (the common doom), then skepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whenc we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must here to learn it.”

-Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or, The Whale