We recently looked at the visual allure of colours and materials via the Instagram account of a silk manufacturer. Yet the same themes could be approached analysing the work of an artist such as Victor Vasarely and in particular his use of tiles and colour schemes.
Vasarely created for example glazed porcelain relief tiles for Rosenthal that he employed for wall pieces characterised by basic geometric shapes and repetitions of colours.
Oran Hoffmann, an emerging artist born in 1981 in Kibbutz Sarid and now working between Tel Aviv and Amsterdam, must have been fascinated by Vasarely's ceramic works as he attempted to catalogue a series of basic materials, including tiles, that Vasarely employed for his large-scale works.
Hoffmann isolated ceramic tiles, aluminium pieces and paper sheets he found during a one year research at the Fondation Vasarely in Aix-en-Provence.
He then photographed each of these elements separately focusing on shapes and colours, trying to interpret the versatility and modularity of Vasarely's works through his images that were then collected in the volume Vasarely Material Archives (out on RVB Books).
People who are acquainted with Vasarely's works know that these basic elements are parts of a larger and more complex puzzle revolving around the principle of modularity.
The prefabricated tiles aree small pieces that could be recombined together and re-shifted to create Vasarely's Op Art works: the tiles could therefore be considered as Op-tiles or proto-tiles, employed not to make floors or decorative elements, but geometrical patterns.
The most interesting thing about the volume is that the tiles in some of its images could be used as the primordial mathematical elements to create geometrically modular games or more intricate compositions, graphic alphabets characterised by specific colours such as neutral black and white, pale green or cobalt blue.
The idea behind the book is indeed focusing on small elements, abstract them from their context and employ them for new and imaginary works.
The humble tile becomes therefore a medium to explore the diversity, modularity and variability of a structure generated through repetitions of proto-tiles, employed to make endless and unrestricted combinations that allow creative minds to explore spatial depths and dynamic movements.
Comments