230: The Smooth Surface Gives Way: Kawauchi's Light, Ultramarine Lime, the Dnipro, Buckled Steel
Rinko Kawauchi's Illuminance, extrastudio's blue house in Marvila, a road trip down the Dnipro, Tim Teven's pressed tube, Satoru Kurata at Triangolo, and studiofont in Baja California.
Rinko Kawauchi did not photograph the 2011 catastrophe in Japan. She photographed the ordinary persisting at its edges, in a light that obscures rather than clarifies, thinning surfaces and loosening things from their own outlines. A related refusal to let a surface settle runs through Marvila, where extrastudio wraps an 1893 house in Lisbon in a single unbroken coat of ultramarine lime, each facade finished in one day because the blue would tolerate no joints and no repairs. Further east, Eugenia Skvarska and Kalpesh Lathigra drove the Dnipro from Kyiv to Zaporizhzhia across two summers and came back with willow trees, ferry terminals, watermelons and swimmers, a portrait of a region during an invasion that declines to let the invasion be the whole subject.
Tim Teven started the Tube Collection in 2021, when steel supply broke and one size of tube was all the studio had left on the shelf. Pressing it, bending it, watching where it buckled, he let the deformation do the designing, and five years on the collection is still open. At Triangolo in Cremona, in the former theatre of the Church of San Luca, Satoru Kurata paints dawn and dusk as psychological weather: hybrid figures, phone screens in blue dark, each canvas built from two viewpoints at once. And near Todos Santos, studiofont pours a pigmented concrete frame across the Baja desert, board-formed and pink, and treats it as a ruin arriving early.
From Climax: Daily life presents itself as smooth and manageable, a surface that holds. The philosopher Masatake Shinohara argues that the smoothness is an illusion, and that Rinko Kawauchi‘s Illuminance is among the few bodies of work that let the illusion come apart.
From DwellWell: On a cobbled street in the former industrial quarter of Marvila in Lisbon, extrastudio transforms and extends a modest 1893 house into Casa Azul, wrapping the whole volume in a single unbroken coat of ultramarine lime.
Along the Dnipro, the river that runs through the middle of Ukraine, Eugenia Skvarska and Kalpesh Lathigra made Unofficial Dnipro, a record of two summer road trips from Kyiv to Zaporizhzhia.
From The New Chair: When steel supply failed during the pandemic, Tim Teven Studio worked with the one size of tube left on the shelf, pressing and bending it into the Tube Collection, six pieces built from a single deformation.
At Triangolo, Cremona in Italy, Satoru Kurata paints dawn and dusk as psychological weather: hybrid figures between human and animal, phone screens in blue dark, each scene holding two people looking from different sides at once.
From Concrete Stories: Set on an eight-thousand-square-meter plot near Todos Santos, Baja California, studiofont builds Nereidas, a pigmented-concrete framework the studio treats as a contemporary ruin.
