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Juliet, art magazine, "Olafur
Thordarson" by Elena Carlini and Pietro Valle, Associazione
Juliet,
Trieste, Italy, p 50, November,
2000.
translation
Olafur Thordarson
Olafur Thordarson, a young Icelandic artist-designer residing in New
York City, projects us in a vortex of organic elements constructed with
artificial materials: on the one side whirlpools, cliffs, crevices,
mushroom formations and entanglements of branches that recall the wildest
extremes of the Nordic landscape imagination; on the othe, plastics,
resins and rubbers brought to their utmost informal state and connected to
an all-American line of experimentation with the tactility of industrial
materials (think of such diverse authors as Jackson Pollock, Charles Eames,
Claes Oldenburg, the early Serra and Eva Hesse).
In the fluid form of plastic resins pursued by Thordarson, surfaces and
volumes become unstable diaphragms that fill in casts and are supported by
tree branches as if they could never manage to achieve an ultimate
configuration. Sometimes they dilate in convex shells whose curvature
seems to have no end; other times they are eroded and become termite
settlements, veritable fractal cities subdivided in infinite recess. Color
is not tied to forms but coalesces and dilutes into ameboid shapes
suspended in opalescent fluids. Even transparency and opacity, hardness
and softness do not have definite boundaries: the physical status of
Thordarson's domestic objects seems to exist in an endless metamorphosis
and we do not know if, by touching the Tulip Lamp, it will melt,
unfold like a blossom, crumble as a piece of pastry or respond to our
touch with a surprisingly hard surface. Matter is unpredictable, the
artist-designer is a contemporary trash alchemist, the objects, even if
created for everyday use, never recall known artifacts but seem to have
fallen on earth from a faraway planet.
Thordarson employs industrial procedures (casts for plastics and resins)
but mixes materials in such a way that his multiples are never identical
in their surface finish and color. In doing so he erases the distinction
between serial and crafted product, unique and multiple, rational and
organic: all the polar opposites used to define the industrial and
artistic object lose any meaning. We are in a repetitive and ever mutant
universe, in a sort of chemical proliferation that escaped the designer's
control and now reproduces itself spontaneously. The more the process is
repetitive, the more diverse and unexpected the final results are: it
seems therefore that the idea of an "organic" configuration is
not only a formal category that describes the finished product but a
structural part of the creative process. Thordarson takes a route that
uses uncontrolled generation as a research tool, as a device to test the
limits of industrial fluids, to take to the edge structural relations that
employ complex lattices and multiple joints, to breed strange beings whose
final complexion is not given for granted. In applying this generative
process to everyday objects and not only to art pieces, Thordarson brings
back the adventure of art in the everyday house, in that domestic
environment that nowadays is too overwhelmed with fashionable design clichés.
Thordarson's home becomes jungle, forbidden planet, discovery trip
but also child game, grimace, pantomime. A dry irony permeates his world
and helps to dilute the invading power of his objects with a smile. We can
only recall here the wine rack Delirium Tremens, undertitled
"support for wine in company of the spirits": folly,
functionality, joke and the ritual of drinking all gather in this tilted
piece of cabinetry with the profile of a bottle and triangular
subdivisions: is there any other industrial designer able to joke in this
way without imposing another case of "good from"?
by Elena Carlini and Pietro Valle.
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