We tend to think that everything has already been done in all sorts of fields – from art to fashion, design and film. Yet, deep down, we know that this is impossible as creative minds will always keep on producing, experimenting and coming up with more original stories,intriguing pieces and innovative techniques.
German artist Florian Baudrexel favours, for example, a very ordinary material – carboard – but employs it in extraordinary ways. Baudrexel creates indeed three-dimensional bold sculptures, wall reliefs that, moving from the techniques employed to make architectural models, combine Constructivism with more contemporary assemblages and sculptures and with the artist's own interest in dynamic forces, the Avant-garde movement and the aesthetics of the Machine Age.
Bartha Contemporary is currently celebrating him in an online exhibition of Baudrexel's lacquered cardboard pieces: in these artworks planes intersect one with the other, creating densely textured compositions that call to mind Kurt Schwitters' abstract collages, Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero's complessi plastici or Lee Bontecou’s assemblages.
The sculptures at times look like mysterious pastel coloured engines as each cardboard part seems to have a precise purpose; at others, they hint at abstract representations and spatial concepts and also have a playful element about them.
The artist develops these complex and multi-layered sculptures that could be placed at the intersection of art and design after making models that serve to him as points of reference and that allow him to let the cardboard shapes flow and intersect one with the other in a seemingly fluid way and extend from the flat canvas into other dimensions.
Geometric abstractions, multi-layered styles and assemblages also characterized some of the designs showcased at Central Saint Martins's The White Show, the annual project for which every first-year BA Fashion student creates a look from a piece of plain white calico or felt fabric in collaboration with the BA Fashion Communication students who conceptualise and present the show.
This year's edition of The White Show, held in the Granary building's street, was entitled "The Playground" and featured a wide range of original looks, from padded pieces to bulbous designs.
Gora Tosic's coat was inspired by a casual collage that happened while he was cutting out paper crosses: scraps of paper falling made him realise they could have been used for something unusual, so he added glue onto blank pieces of paper and let gravity do the compositions that he then proceeded to scan and collaged into photoshop, using the images he obtained as references for his fabric compositions.
Polina Kadinikova created instead a wearable assemblage of overenlarged, stylised padded everyday objects from keys and charging ports to earphone cables, that she used to ponder about the way we treat random objects such as our phones almost with a religious respect.
Multi-layered compositions and assemblages can therefore be inifinitely reinvented, as proved by the artists included in this post. Maybe a quote by director Stanley Kubrick, can help us keeping on reimagining these techniques: "Everything has already been done, every story has been told and every scene has been shot. It's our job to do it one better."
