Art & Exhibitions
At Cristin Tierney, Filip Dujardin Constructs Brutalist Playgrounds for the Eye
THE DAILY PIC: His digital fictions reveal the sculptural play in functionalism.
Blake Gopnik
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THE DAILY PIC (#1359): In this age of Photoshop, I couldn’t be sure at first if this image by Filip Dujardin was real or a digital construction. It turns out that it is mostly digital, from a series called (appropriately enough) Fictions. It’s on view in a summer show called “The Architectural Impulse,” curated by Warren James at Cristin Tierney gallery in New York.
For several decades now, it’s been fashionable to make art about the failures of utopian modernism, but I’ve often thought that all those critical images of the Barbican in London or Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille also took secret pleasure in their designs. With Dujardin’s piece, I wonder if the pleasure hasn’t at last come out on top: At least to my eyes, his Brutalist fantasy looks like somewhere I’d want to spend time. He uses Photoshop to underline the pure sculptural play that was really at stake in a lot of the concrete buildings that billed themselves as brutally functionalist.
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