We love these paintings by James Rieck

After having met while studying at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Kirstie van Noort and Rogier Arents each went their own way. Van Noort prefers to do extensive research on materials or processes beforehand, using the information resulting from the research as a fundament for the story behind the end product. Rogier Arents on the other hand is a designer and communicator of scientific research. And although these approaches inhabit their differences, their first joint project distinctively named Color Collision turned out to be very interesting.

The designers state on the unique process they applied and which is the core of the project: “Materials are affected by their circumstances. The pigment in red cabbage is subject to a striking change in color when the PH value in the environment changes. When applied to ceramics this results in unprecedented colors. This intriguing moment of color collision is captured on film, in a series of photos (and highly appealing posters) and on a porcelain sidetable, each revealing a part of the story.” The beautiful sidetable, which was created only ten times by the designers, is made out of porcelain and ash wood, the tabletop has a diameter of 50 centimeter and a height of 40 centimeter. The product was first presented at Dutch Invertuals which had the theme ’Transform’, during Salone Del Mobile in Milan from the 9th until the 14th of this month.

See their websites for more information on this project and other work of: Kirstie van Noort and Rogier Arents.

Amazing photography, scenes between man nature – ‘Paths’ by Ruben Brulat on designboom

Last few days we stayed in Alentejo’s countryside, close to the beautiful beaches of the southwest Portuguese coast, at Casa da Diná. A bed & breakfast run by the Portuguese and Uruguayan couple Dina Medeiros and Walter Betbeder Rosso. Traveled the world themselves they decided to set home at Malavado and combine Walter’s atelier with this lovely bed & breakfast of four double rooms, a delicious homemade breakfast and now and then a dinner to share Dina’s love for Portuguese cuisine.

While enjoying this lovely place, we got inspired by the works of Walter and his atelier. The beautiful earth-toned palette, the geometrical forms, simplicity and cubist style in contrast to his palettes incorporated in this world of simplicity.

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, Walter moved to Washington DC, met Dina and together moved to Portugal. As a young man he received artistic guidance from José Gurvitch and Jorge Damiani. In 1970, Walter set up a studio with fellow artist Héctor del Castillo, and from 1981 to 1992 he belonged to the studio Taller de Puerto, in Montevideo. His paintings have been exhibited in galleries in Uruguay, United States and Portugal.

We love the combination of geometrical paintings with his palettes as ‘random’ and unconscious paintings. In his own words:

“If we set aside speculation and accept that painting is the art of organising coloured matter on a supporting plane, and that surrealism is governed by the subconscious, the painter’s palette could be a direct surrealistic ‘work’: it bypasses the filter of reason.” 

— Walter Rosso, for Fernando Pessoa, thinking is a disease of the eye.

If you want to buy his work, you’ll need to visit Casa da Diná. And if you want to visit Casa da Diná, you’ll probably leave with a work of Walter in your suitcase!

HENSE recently finished his largest installation to date in lima, peru, which measures 40m tall and 50m wide. As featured on Designboom

We really love the incredible ceramic sculptures designed by Japanese Kanazawa College of Art Bachelor graduate Hitomi Hosono. After complementary studies at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the graduation of a Masters degree at the Royal College of Art in London Hosono has perfected her craft and creates one of a kind botanical ceramic sculptures. The proces of creating her artworks roughly breaks down as follows; firstly it takes one month to create the mold, three intense weeks follow to attach the folliage, and it lastly takes up to five months to let the sculptures dry. The now London-based artist’s lifelike depictions of leafage were recently awarded with a Perrier-Jouët Arts Salon Prize, a new award officiated by the producer of Champagne from the French Épernay region.

Hosono creates her wonderfully detailed sculptures all from memory, particularly, from the time spent on a farm in Gifu where she observed lots of greenery as a child. Because of her photographic memory a lot of the then seen plants have found a place in her imagination. The visual images the artist bears in her memory are so vast that she’ll often forget where they are from although a majority seem to be from the mentioned time at the farm in Gifu. When interviewed Hosono has confessed: “I’ll send my mother a sketch and ask her if she knows what the flower is and she’ll say, ‘We have it in our garden, don’t you remember?” The dedication and craftsmanship of Hosono is exceptional which shows through the fact that before each leaf or bud is placed, it has to be fine-tuned using dentists’ tools. This process takes as mentioned three weeks in which the artist works around the clock with few breaks. She states: “Otherwise, with the replication, the detail can fall away. This is the core of my work, really. Each one has to be perfect.”

‘45 minutes wishing I was someplace else.’

Time Wasting Experiment, a lovely project by Alyson Provax.

Packed with varied, unexpected material in all kinds of forms, The White Review brings a message from the future: it rises to meet readers’ and writers’ continuing needs to experience art and literature in a sensuous, delectable form; and it gives me the feeling that I have my finger on the pulse.

—Marina Warner

The amazing artworks by Christopher Saunders. Here Whitenoise no. 14, 2011

Photographer Michael Wolf’s latest work reveals the extremity of one of the world’s most dense urban spaces. Here’s a photo collection sharing a view on Hong Kong’s Massive High Rises on PSFK

On the occasion of Fernando Matrangelo and Beacon’s first LP The Ways We Separate, Brooklyn-based sculptor Fernando Mastrangelo has created a 13”x13” cast sugar sculptural object that houses the vinyl and which simply reads in bold capital letters TWWS.
Preorder it at The Ghostly Store.

Chanel n°5 first saw day in 1921 within a highly dynamic creative context. Since the Cubist revolution brought about by Picasso’s Demoiselles d’avignon, in 1907 and the advent of Futurism in italy in 1908, the avant-garde ceaselessly went about writing a particular modernity which would finally triumph at the dawn of the 1920s. From that moment abstraction spanned all forms of creativity, equally inspiring art, poetry, literature and music, and the fragrance of this new perfume which evoked a very mysterious flower, unless of course it didn’t firstly evoke a woman.Coco Chanel hoped and prayed for this “perfume with the scent of woman” and she baptized it with the number 5, to avoid any attempts at defining it figuratively or descriptively. Close to some of the most innovative creators of the day, including Cocteau, Picasso, Apollinaire, Stravinsky, Dali and Diaghilev; Chanel maintained an amicable dialogue with each. The rich exchanges of ideas strengthened her as she rode the current of modernity she had taken as her own. The n°5 CULTURE CHANEL exhibition in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris is a voyage to the very heart of the Chanel universe. Between reality and fiction, the n°5 story provides keys to a creative world which never ceases to enrich itself through time. Born in the spirit of the moment, and of a woman’s aspirations and those of an epoch, the n°5 perfume bears and reveals a creative approach which is both visionary and unique to Chanel. The exhibition has once again been entrusted to Jean-Louis Froment, the curator of  the previous editions of CULTURE CHANEL, held successively in Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum for Fine Arts, in Beijing at the National Art Museum of China and more recently in the Opera House in Canton. Others that participated in the creation of the exhibition are graphic designer Irma Boom, legendary garden designer Piet Oudolf, Laurent Burgisser and Jérôme Schlomoff.

The exhibition will run from May 5th until June 5th, 2013 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.