05. Geometry disguised as nature
Three cases, three techniques, a century apart. A fresco that has to make stones fall on a façade. A monument that has to freeze a throw in granite. A bunker that has to vanish into a mountain wall.
In all three the boulder is not observed. It is reconstructed.
And to reconstruct it, one needs to know what its form is made of.
The answer is always the same. A boulder is recognised by a limited number of features: broad planes meeting along sharp edges, no right angles, multiple resting surfaces, a centre of gravity that seems unstable. They are few, they can be described, and they can be applied.
In Wagner’s falling boulders and in Pessina’s block the faces are broad, the edges sharp, and no pair of planes closes at a right angle. This is not an effect of technique, since painting and chisel reach the same result by different routes. And it is a rule that holds for boulders only: on the same frescoed wall the ridges and vertical fractures meet at much narrower angles.
Which means that the boulder, the most formless thing in the landscape, the one that more than any other seems to have no design, is in fact a recognisable geometric figure.
Not form without rule. Rule that presents itself as the absence of rule.
This is the discovery from which the whole cycle starts. If natural form has a grammar, it can be written. And if it can be written, it can be performed: start from a regular solid, apply a procedure, obtain something the landscape recognises as its own.
The disguise, however, works in both directions. Geometry can disguise itself as nature: this is what Wagner, Pessina and the Albula wall do. But then nature, too, seen up close, is geometry in disguise. In the real boulder the planes, the edges and the angles are already there.
It is not a matter of imitating nature. It is a matter of noticing that it was already doing the same thing. How one moves from this observation to a constructed object is the subject of the part that follows.
Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago
Erratico accidentale calibro 100 n. 2, 2018. 3D print in polylactic acid, 10 × 10 × 10 cm.