Sachgebiete

Beschreibung:

47 S. mit zahlr. Abb. Broschiert.

Bemerkung:

Einband gering berieben. - Baroque architecture made explicit emotional appeals to its audience as it conducted the individual toward the transcendent in religious structures or symbolically absorbed them into the emerging nation state through secular ones. Moore is looking for ways to reconcile contemporary man and woman with the incommensurable scale and spaces of the late 20th century built environment by using some of the same formal devices that worked 300 years ago. The difference is that all of Moore's materials are machine-made, and many of his juxtapositions are humorous rather than mysterious. To those familiar with Western architecture and its classical vocabulary, Moore's drawings and paintings at first seem familiar. Close study reveals, however, that the factory roofs, cornices, columns and column capitals, doorways and windows, garden ornaments and fountains, are all constructed of steel beams, tubes, pipes, rivets and bolts, sheet metal, cable and chain link. Moore believes this new lingua franca of building materials can be fabricated into humanizing decorative elements to mediate between the large masses of modern buildings and the human observer, at the same time preserving traditional forms and motifs. Even the techniques of the paintings and drawings on view in this exhibition reflect Moore's concern with understanding the properties of materials and developing the inner logic of those properties. Just as the steel design components are uncompromisingly industrial, malleable and repetitive, and welcomed as such, so are contemporary techniques for reproduction and scale adjustment incorporated into the finished drawings and paintings. Moore enlarges and photocopies original pencil drawings onto gray drawing paper, then uses the dissolving lines and planes as the ground to be worked over with watercolor, acrylic, ink and colored pencil. These drawings are again enlarged and projected to produce the paintings. Here the visual artist supplants the architect, exploring the nuances of color and texture, and elaborating a pictorial drama of plane and line, light and dark, surface and illusion, variety and control. In technique and in content, then, "Industrial Baroque" is an art and an architecture unifying contrasts, most fundamentally the line and the curve and the human and the colossal. Through Moore's synthetic vision the modern and the traditional work together in architecture, just as he has used the language of the Renaissance draughtsman for these thoroughly contemporary drawings. As T.S. Eliot observed, a tradition is altered by every work produced within it. Moore's "Industrial Baroque" does just that. (S. 7)