Venetian Project - Palladio, Palladio, Palladio …(detail)
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| Reconfiguring Ruskin’s Stones. By Jessica Kraft, 2005 | |||||
| To stand behind Aaron Yassin’s camera is to begin to fashion an alternate reality that lies somewhere between the figure and the ground, conflates abstraction and representation, and occupies the edge separating fact from fiction. The truth of the moment—here among Venetian palaces, churches and piazzas—is multiplied into escalating tiers of understanding, as Yassin digitally manipulates his photographs into kaleidoscopic splices that repeat, mirror and transform across his rectangular vistas. | |||||
| By cutting and pasting specific architectural elements, Yassin’s large-format photographic prints offer a contemporary vision of the infinite similar to what the Islamic tile-cutters attempted to achieve with their abstracted gardens, ornamented mosques and shrines across the Arab world. It is fitting, then, that Yassin should take for his subject that city which sat for so many centuries as a portal between eastern and western empires, its architecture a graft of Moorish motifs and medieval Christian ornamentation. | |||||
| San Marco for John Ruskin (2005) distills the splendor of the city’s crowning monument into rhythmic medallions of touristic homage, plotted against a rich turquoise sky. Who has not visited Venice and yearned to take its majesty and romance home in some keepsake of infinite beauty? Italo Calvino described this particularly Venetian desire in Invisible Cities: “ … the city which can not be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honey-comb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember.” | |||||
| Call them honeycombs, tessellations or pictographic tiles; these images refract both the initial impression of his camera and the typologies of architectural ornament. In decoration, arches, vaults, friezes and lintels have almost always framed and positioned other, more focal elements. While a work like The Phoenix (2005) does dazzle with its illuminated chandeliers and light-flocked pinwheels, it is the architecture (and its fearful symmetry), which substantiates our gaze and also becomes the intermediary between these endlessly photographed monuments and the unknown spiritual potential that Yassin unlocks with his structured images in his pursuit of a new perception. | |||||
| EDITION |
| This series is editioned in two sizes. All works are archival pigment prints on Epson Enhanced matte paper, signed, numbered and printed by the artist. |
| Large: |
| Image size 60” x 40” Printed on 65” x 44” paper. 5 prints and 1 artist’s proof. |
| Small: |
| Image size 45” x 30” Printed on 50” x 34” paper. 5 prints and 1 artist's proofs. |
| all content © 2006 Aaron Yassin |