Predator

source: articleslatimes

Created by Argentine painter Fabian Marcaccio and Los Angeles architect Greg Lynn, “The Predator” takes inspiration from the special effects-laden Arnold Schwarzenegger film of the same name.

Thickly striated, constructed of panels supported by metal rods, “The Predator” is gouged by rough-edged openings. In places it sports jagged strips of plastic resembling ragged ribs. Its skin is almost transparent, occasionally smeared with Halloween-colored daubs of paint.

Inside, Marcaccio’s printed imagery flows like a roiling, primordial sea. Sometimes simple black grids hold sway, echoing the installation’s digital origins. Lynn designed “The Predator” with animation software. He birthed it using a computer-assisted manufacturing process.

Mostly, though, patterns of prehistoric-looking plant shapes predominate. Images of evolution for a new kind of art, the artists presumably thought. But like Dr. Frankenstein, they have created a hybrid whose parts don’t quite mesh.

Marcaccio’s imagery seems a decorative element that floats on the surface, not fully incorporated into the essential nature of the piece. The work does not feel like a single, organic whole. Instead, what we get is a large, nicely decorated, walk-in sculpture that took quite some time to prepare.

Marcaccio and Lynn first conjured “The Predator” when they were artists in residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University. Both have extensive resumes. Both like to tinker with form, surface and process.

The project’s nod to cinema and its incorporation of technology sound appealing but do not evidence themselves enough in the finished product.

In all, “The Predator” feels seriously retro, and not just in a cinematic sense. It resembles stabs at experimental inflatable architecture made in the ’60s and ’70s.

Still, Lynn and Marcaccio do stir some intriguing thoughts. Is this how we might eventually live, inside just such an organic, air-sensitive shelter? Is this what our interface with art, or art-as-life, might be? Or is this best reserved for the Sci-Fi Channel?

The chief rewards of “The Predator” are its allusions to the murky future of life and our pop culture-derived fears and fantasies of same. That, plus a peek at the thought process of two irreverent artists.

Perhaps in the future they will build a better beast. In the meantime, their “Predator” is fleeting fun, in a funky, overblown kind of way.
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source: secessionat

The joint project by Greg Lynn and Fabian Marcaccio can be seen as a combination of architecture and the visual arts. Their collaboration can be compared to that of Richard Meier and Donald Judd whose works created an “ideal space” by merging sculpture and architecture. The architect Greg Lynn and the painter Fabian Marcaccio developed a different way of occupying space by coalescing different areas such as iconography and topography in an urban setting. The project at the Secession comprises all of these territories, facilitating a complex social and interdisciplinary exchange between these realms.

Greg Lynn, born 1964 in Vermilion, Ohio, is one of the architects who are generating a new architecture by means of the computer. This is based on Lynn’s view of a dynamic environment whose very different forces have a potential impact on a building. Whereas in traditional architecture the primacy given to the factor of gravity results in verticality and statics, Lynn’s constructions derive their form from a synthesis of the complex directional forces at work. Crucial for Lynn’s concept is the integration of temporality and motion in the architectural process of creating form. To this end, he feeds the computer with topographical, urban planning related, thermic, etc. data of a specific site and lets it compute the flow movement of all these factors on the basis of parameters. In a process of animation the computer generates amorphous spatial bodies whose strong deformation is a visible result of spatial and temporal factors.

Greg Lynn developed the project at the Secession primarily on the basis of the architectural givens of the building. Proceeding from the dome – the most conspicuous sign of the building which is symbolic of the Secession movement – the architect developed a flowing, amorphous structure without corners and edges. A construction consisting of aluminum poles extends from the dome over the facade into the entrance hall and then into the exhibition room of the Secession. With this both dynamically moving and mathematically precise form, Lynn refers to the complex architectural contrast between the organic structure of the dome and the rigid geometry of the Secession building. At the same time the construction oscillates and mediates between three art genres. On the exterior, it appears to be an architectural intervention, whereas on the inside it assumes sculptural qualities and also serves as a supporting element for Fabian Marcaccio’s painting.

Fabian Marcaccio, born 1963 in Rosario de Santa Fe, Argentina, clearly addresses the formal issues of classical modern painting and American abstract expressionism before dealing with the legacy of modernism in a critical and personal way. Instead of concentrating on a specific painterly problem in his paintings, he refers to a number of painting-immanent issues of avantgarde art by citing them. He gives this mixture of references to art history an ironic twist by emblematically isolating the quotations used and overdrawing them. This is visible, for instance, in the basic means of design employed by abstract expressionism: e.g., brushstroke, grid, stripe. Notwithstanding all the irony and detached-playful approach to the tradition of modernism, ultimately it is the basic questions of painting that interest Marcaccio – questions he seeks to solve in a contemporary way. Thus the relationship of figure and ground is just as much a theme in his work as the potential object character of painting resulting from the fact that it is inseparably linked with the picture surface. In his most recent works, Marcaccio has used the surface of the painting as a point of departure, experimenting with a “spatial” type of painting. His abstract compositions on canvas that are hung on nylon strings gradually broke with their two-dimensionality and developed into the surrounding space as sculptural formations.