Projective Ornament
A Project by Karlos Gil
(…) We are all of us participators in a world of sounds, odours, forms, motions, colours… so mathematically related and coordinated that our pigmy bodies, equally with the farthest star, vibrate to the music of the spheres. There is a Beautiful Necessity which rules the world, which is a law of nature and equally a law of art, for art is an idealized creation: Nature carried to a higher power by Reason of its passage through a human consciousness.
Thought and emotion tend to crystallize into forms of Beauty as inevitably as does the frost on a window pane. Art therefore in one of its aspects is the weaving of a pattern, the communication of an order and a method to the material or medium employed.
Projected solids and hypersolids, unfolded figures, magic lines in magic squares, these and similar translations of the truths of number into graphic form, are the words and syllables of the new ornamental mode. But we shall fail to develop a form of language, eloquent and compelling, if we preoccupy ourselves solely with sources –the mere lexicography of ornament. There is a grammar and a rhetoric to be mastered as well. But the words are not enough, there remains the problem of the word order.
To create a new ornamental mode, we should conceive of ornament in this spirit, not as mere rhythmic space subdivision and flower conventionalization, but as symbology, most pregnant and profund. We must believe that form can teach as eloquently as the spoken word…
Claude Fayette Bragdon
Projective Ornament is a project by Karlos Gil that takes its name from the namesake book written in 1915 by the American architect and theosophist Claude Bragdon, in which the author creates a system for drawing three-dimensional ornament on a two-dimensional plane. Bragdon believed that the ornament provides a critical opportunity for meaningful expression, creating a universal form-language to replace the variety of historical styles.
The show features works by Nora Barón, Eva Fábregas, Claude Fayette Bragdon, Carlos Fernández-Pello, Karlos Gil, The Infinite Library (Daniel Gustav Cramer & Haris Epaminonda), Enrico Piras & Alessandro Sau & Salvatore Moro, paraSITE, André Romao, Víctor Santamarina and Belén Zahera.
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