a hint of halfslant

top: Arc de la Défense, Paris, France (1990 CE), bottom: Regtisan, Samarkand, Uzbekistan (circa 1400 CE)

Nearly five hundred years and several cultures apart, it’s amazing how similair the ideas behind these structures are. There’s a very obvious need for the negative space, the long and wide flat area is probably the most important thing for the designs to succeed. But not only does the large empty square allow the arc and the Registan to feel monumental, it also provides a breezeway through both structures.

What makes the impression is not the enormous stature of the buildings, but their apparent depth and the sense of solidity that is created from that depth.

February 06, 2009, 4:03pm

Red sets the scene, a static vantage point frames the narrative.

Sometimes the aesthetic stars align and all the advertising companies and product placements work together to create a stage one could only dream of.

Here’s a Paris metro station in a very complete nutshell.

February 01, 2009, 11:36am

When I think of an Haute Couture fashion show, I imagine an intricately handcrafted  presentation of a concept that just happens to be worn.

At Xuan-Thu Nguyen’s Spring Summer 2009 Haute Couture show, I got all of this and even an embroidered snap bracelet.(Which just came in very handy when trying to spell her name.) In Haute Couture, obsession gets dressed up as decoration and flourishes of colour as materialisations of a risk taken on the part of the designer. The models float by like vessels for these art works. They come and go too fast for me to really care about the clothes.  Instead I fixate on the details. An eyebrow drawn in a stunning way, an errant piece of hair or a spirally way of walking in a straight line.

After a few pieces a selection of models returns to the runway in what I originally thought were awkwardly clunky dresses and jackets. Standing completely still and looking out into the audience their motionlessness is interrupted by a young man who proceeds to un-do (via zippers, buttons and latches) each of the young woman’s clothes, revealing wonderful bursts of colorful flowers.

The staging was touchingly poignant. The young man seemed nervous as he slowly worked and the models ignored him like elegant trees. The color that sprung from the beneath the grays and the trembling fingers that released them transformed the clothes into malleable works of art,the models into performers and the runway into a stage. There is no reason to even wonder whether art and fashion have merged. At this show, they were indistinguishable.

January 30, 2009, 11:14pm

It’s been a week now since we saw the Mantegna show at the Louvre in Paris. One thing of note that was particularly interesting for Halfslant was the thematic emphasis on Mantegna’s love of detail.

With the large and varied crowd that the Louvre draws, it’s difficult to curate a show without either leaving some people behind, or boring the regulars. The Mantegna show used small written introductions to a select series of works that asked the audience to look for key images in each painting.

This “Where’s Waldo” approach was very fun and extremely effective - serving as a prompt to one of the most important dialogues a person can have with a painting, what is this and why was it painted?

January 26, 2009, 11:37am