Archive for June, 2009
Robert Lazzarini's Skulls
June 1, 2009 by ric, under mirrors / displays / frames, video installations.
“Robert Lazzarini’s new sculptures continue his exploration of compound distortions of three-dimensional objects. The intensity of these works comes from the fact that they linger somewhere in between an image and an object. The distortions oscillate between two- and three-dimensionality, creaing an unsettling spatial paradox. They appear to expand and contract as your vantage point shifts, suggesting something both static and moving.
Within the context of the still life, Lazzarini draws upon the historical relationship between distortion and death and object as momento mori. The sculptures have the impression of collapsing upon themselves, slipping towards their end.
Lazzarini utilizes two-dimensional distortions such as anamorphism (accelerated perspective) and applies them to three-dimensional objects. As the object becomes a projection of the image, the wall becomes a projection of the ground.
All of the works in this group are derivatives of specific objects. The original object is digitized and brought into computer space as a 3D model. Using both animation and industrial design programs, the distortions are applied using a computer workstation. Models are then generated by various means of rapid prototyping (computer-generated model making). The final sculpture is then made using the same materials as the original object.
“Robert Lazzarini’s sculptures are at once rigorously formal and intensely expressive. As distorted versions of familiar objects, they appear in the process of slipping- from three to two dimensions, from
realism to abstraction, from this world to the next. Products of a dense and innovative process, his works seem both real and unreal: their striking immediacy is belied by a quality of ghostliness, as if they were hardly there at all.- John B. Ravenal, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, VMFA, 2004.”
“Anamorphosis is a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image.”
