POLYTOPIA

Riviera

Polytopia Riviera unfolds as a luminous miniature city, with its clustered towers, rotating rooftops, and saturated colors composing a shifting architectural landscape. Among the most lyrically colored constructions in the series, it brings translucent surfaces, architectonic elements, and artificial light into a chromatic interplay reminiscent of Delaunay’s experiments with color and rhythm. Mechanical rotation carries that interplay into discrete concentrations that stir the chromatic mosaic of the neighboring forms. The Riviera’s glitzy skyline rises above a shipwrecked underworld, where a programmed NeoPixel sequence gives light the undulating rhythm of remembrance. Color travels through the submerged scene in waves, drawing its scattered remnants into a recurring pulse, as the construction brings together the divergent temporalities of the forgetfulness above and its mnemonic nemesis below. Polytopia Riviera is a small theater of appearances, desire, and accumulated memory. Its architectural exuberance invites the eye to wander, its light show hovering over the city’s layered depths with a brilliance that acquires the density of a place haunted by its afterimages.

Multi-media construction

36" Wide x 12" Deep x 50" High

Wood, Acrylic, PLA 3d printed parts, Found and repurposed objects, Motors, Neopixel and other LEDs.

​Click on image for larger view.

"Imagine a city with several entrances, a labyrinthine proliferation of squares, crossroads, thoroughfares and side streets, a kind of multibody of the past and memory. In short a baroque town: Rome, Vienna, perhaps Mexico City. Here a flaneur is eagerly seeking out the new and the strange scale-games played with reality and unreality. In this theatre, the traveler with no homeland and no source of rest meets a venerable old man. 'Who are you?' he asks. 'I am disillusion' comes the reply. The man takes him on a tour of this phantasmal city with a thousand faces. They come to a main street, nameless and without end, inhabited by a thousand figures: the Street of Hypocrisy. And there they find a beautiful woman who leaves hearts filled with sighing and desire, a gentle face of snow and roses wrapped in her own aura - the very object of love. The master of disillusion then reveals all: her teeth have been artificially whitened, her hair dyed, her face skillfully made up and behind the appearances age and death are doing their work. Everywhere in this street of the mighty and beautiful, the world is upside down. Madame Fashion and Madame Death are on the prowl. It must be turned the right side up again: to baffle all the frontiers of the real and unreal, belief and knowledge, world and theatre; to see the world from within."                                                                       

                                                                                                       Christine Buci-Glucksman BaroqueReason.