Modulor
welded metal
185x60x30x120cm
2018-2025
Modulor
There are no real angles. The aerial metal compartments have sloping surfaces and rounded corners. They are symmetrical after geometrical figures other than the rectangle, the square, or the trapeze. However, unknown properties activate the Modulor’s shell when living bodies enter its section. Its sculptural spaces. Shaped as a bodily self-portrait of the artist.
There, no void is a void. Inside, it’s not in the shape of things that humans are things. But in the shape of an infinite.
The infinity, for some, is a planetarium, a frozen whirlpool at the end of the world, a vast map of concentric galaxies, round whose borders one may find an interminable collection of ideas, words like objects, a repository of universe mockups.
The infinity for Wojtek Kostrzewa (Warsaw, 1987) speaks of a transparent labyrinth, a harmonized lixeira that is the continuity of a straight line, as visible as a metal wire, and unceasing. Indeed, overwhelming in its symmetries, the street architecture of the Modulor is more of a planetarium than a labyrinth. Where, in an imaginary inside, lying down or curled up, where one can find his stars. From the ground to the sky.
Rounded, insular, and partitioned, it renders the mind as visible as its linear traces. An artistic conception of the inconceivable: it conforms to no outer necessity.
Under different lights, the metal edges may blur as one tries to distinguish a straight outline.Then, the observation of the Modulor becomes vast and interminable, as the spaces it may include. Traversing them becomes an indoor interstellar journey. Beyond street commodified bodies and human trash. Once such expectations occur, no comparative realities will exist. Just a vague sign of orders and matters of contingencies. The Modulor, as a planetarium, becomes the same size as the human, urban gaze it mirrors, which it is. Perplexed and dazed, one encounters a familiar cosmic nostalgia in Modulor’s osmotic solidity. Vertigo at contemplating man's most futile legacy of the infinite in São Paulo. Of throwing away something someone else treasures.Of throwing away someone treasured by someone else.
This infinite dehumanizing chain is absolutized in the precision of the essential aspect of Modulor, which is the entropy of emptiness, reduced to the ideal state, where there is a correspondence between the concept of anomaly and a three-dimensional conformation.
This search for an ideal state, in which the visual event is the exact result of a conceptual process, permits the extreme purification of the idea or concept to the point at which it is presented for what it is: a rational and objective entity that does not admit those subjective or empathetic additions that are part of the usual aesthetic operation. In this sense, Kostrzewa’sworks are visual planetariums based on silent relationships between concepts and processes. They are, like labyrinths, cognitive events that communicate an idea and sacrifice to that idea all the intentionality of material and subject. It is the idea that shapes and gives sense to the work, and it is on the idea or concept that Kostrzewa works, tending to empty his means of expressing their material nature. In this sense, one could define Modulor as a Vitruvian anti-Man, seeing the translation from idea to praxis as contamination and trying to deny us a subjective appreciation of the work, which should instead be given a structural reading. Avoiding infinity,
For almost fifteen years, Kostrzewa’s two- and three-dimensional artworks form an idea and follow a mechanistic rationalism that rejects chaos and leaves nothing to chance. Once the concept is formulated, what follows is not under calibrated material or subjective control. As a matter of fact, the work of art is a conceptual operation that only happens to be embodied in a material or a form—the object and the trace that derive from it are irrelevant compared to the chosen idea or concept.
The production of Modulor is nothing more than a process of visualization of the idea that associates street humans with garbage, which should not be interfered with by, for instance, the wire used. Therefore, one must not choose an artistic or aesthetic idea to produce art; it is enough to take any idea and follow through with its objective assertion. The Modulor’s concept has beentranscribed and not interpreted, given as it is, to communicate what can only be drawn in through it. The medium, the form, and the material used are nothing other than often dull and banal instruments, and their redundant presence has to be gradually annulled in favor of the concept. And its infinity. The indoor installation of Modulor is only a posteriori, de-functionalizing, transcendent operation, which does not affect the method or the chosen conceptual process. Asthe rendering or the drawings the artist conceived.
Thus, the Modulors idea or concept removes what is arbitrary, chance, chaotic, emotive, and subjective to emphasize control, clarity, rationality, and sobriety. In his logical system of the conceptual process, Kostrzewa works with such forms as geometric non-volumes, which are neither strongly characterized nor evocative. In his sculptural practice, his materials are annulled by the noncolors of black and white, whose simplicity does not change the conceptual whole. Their apparent flatness and insignificance tend to concentrate on the intensity of the process that produces them. For instance, the attention paid to Modulor’s elementary forms is only of interest as they seem to produce structural and conceptual entities that are not evident but possess independent meaning. An outer meaning. In Modulor’s intuitive and personal choice of the concept, the theoretical exchange between useless things and humans is as opposed to the abstract systems of the Others. For Kostrzewa, Modulor has to be discovered through intuition, and one works on the intuition of the concept. His work, therefore, has a subjective, not an abstract, matrix; it is based on a human, not a technical, apriority. This is why Modulor becomes an astral as an anthropological space, starting from a purely conceptual structure chosen intuitively and producing a correspondence between that structure and a sign or group of signs.Like stars. And humans.
text by Ginevra Bria
