Saturday, July 22, 2017

Moholy-Nagy, Làszlò (1924). A XX [oil on canvas]. © Artists Rights Society, New York, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

This is an example of the kind of design I personally am trying to emulate. It is spacious, elegant, simple yet complicated. It’s the perfect kind of composition for text placement to create an effective, attention-grabbing poster or advertisement, beyond its strictly expressive utility. | 
The deliberately considered interaction of elements (subject) create this work’s content in an amazingly unified work of nonobjective abstraction. Slight, nearly-indistinguishable line is used to create narrow transparent planes. Line also creates subtle global texture. All other shapes use edge to define their shapes; thick, transparent strokes overlapping at places perfect, dense circles. Lines and edges are both at perfect perpendicular angles; where they are angled, a sense of foreshortening is used to create invasive plastic space. Shapes are either curved or straight; in both cases they’re perfect versions of themselves. 
Besides elemental foreshortening, diminution, convergent intuition, transparency and overlap are used to create amazing plastic space. This work is not perfectly symmetrically balanced elementally (it’s asymmetric), but pictorially it is. The division of balance vertically and horizontally is on the tipping point (half way) because of the interaction between elements and their positions on the picture plane. This work is thoroughly dominated by rigid geometric shapes. Perfect equivocal balance is achieved in how rounded shapes play off straight; downward motion is buoyed by floating objects; dense versus middle versus light values; transparent and solid elements; and far being drawn up into near elements. 
This work is an example of masterful eye movement control. Motion follows the path created by the elements toward the top and acknowledging the picture plane, down along the rectangular shapes, through the circular ones and “out” of the picture plane through the transparent shape occupying the lower half of the canvas. All of the amazing things that are accomplished in this work are done so without the use of objects recognizable in reality. Spatial depth, largely balanced proportions, viewer engagement, perfectly controlled eye movement, and I’m sure things I’m leaving out, are all created in a language created by the artist on the picture plane seamlessly absorbed by the viewer on their own terms. 


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