Crime and Ornament

 12 WALLS exhibition by Paradigma Ariadné | wall-paper design | Vezprém, HU| 2018


The human embryo in the womb embodies the artistic genius to the full extent. When man is born, his artistic taste is pure. Free from any cultural prejudice, he rises above ideologies, open to all styles. His childhood takes him through the revolutions of arts and architecture.
At two years old, he commits himself to primitive painting; at four years old, his experiments in colours and geometries turn him into a Kandinsky, a Miró, or even a Le Corbusier – the artist, we mean.
At six years old, a simplified architecture of flawed proportions transforms him in a Giotto or in a young Aldo Rossi.
At eight years old and beyond, he shall be Fauves or expressionist; he could even aspire to the finest figurative painting, the one portraying Greek temples, myths and heroes of History. Beside this biological evolution, an academic youth takes place – a rare manneristic hiatus where the man, still untied from an artistic morality, is educated to the styles. 
At first the inexperience make a valiant eclectic out of him, open to the curves of Van Der Velde, to the melting surfaces of the last Zaha Hadid, to the organic schemes of Frank Lloyd Wright or even to the geometrical accidents of Deconstructivism.
Later on, the discovery of modern architecture, from the De Stijl to the International Style, from Auguste Perret to Le Corbusier, turns him into a loyal functionalist (an unavoidable chapter from which he will soon run away).
Afterwards, the time comes to confront the post-war avant-gardes, from colossal megastructures to ephemeral devices ready to be clipped-on, plugged-in, be dressed with.
Sooner or later the project is suspended and the drawing turns into reasoning, be it joyful and ironic as in Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, political and militant as in Andrea Branzi or in Pier Vittorio Aureli, or even tragic and nostalgic as in the new disciples of Aldo Rossi.

Finally, the moment of choice.

It is the end of the exuberance, assassinated by the need of a morality and the quest of a new modern.
It will be a “crime”, the assassination of the styles. “Crime and Ornament” is a naïf reflection on the revenge of styles through another victim of the purge carried out by the acolytes of the modern architecture, the “ornament”.

False Mirror Office stages thirty-two memorabilia coming from distant and recent past: archaeological findings of classic architecture, iconic figures borrowed from the masters of the International Style, re-discovered ready-made and other architectural fragments of affection.
Unconstrained from the third dimension and free from any functional preoccupation, these memorabilia undergo a procrustean game that adjusts their form and alters their proportions. Deprived from their architectural value, they are vertically re-assembled with an automatic montage of unforeseen results, a contemporary cadavre exquis.
Reduced to joyful ornaments, they turn into strings of a decorative pattern, depicted on the wall by a painter who is neither a “criminal” nor a “degenerate”.

Someone will shout:

«But the ornament is beautiful!»

and the Papuan will finally have his revenge.




TEAM

Andrea Anselmo
Gloria Castellini
Filippo Fanciotti
Giovanni Glorialanza
Boris Hamzeian
CLIENT

Paradigma Ariadné
2023 Veszprem

INFO

hand-painted by:
Neopaint Works
photos by: 
Balazs Danyi