It comes as no surprise that New Yorkers now officially love their artists more than they love their art. People attend openings for a glimpse of genius in the flesh, largely ignoring the walls in favor of free wine and conversation. To pull a crowd these days, you need more than just the art. In this case, it’s art, fashion and architecture that have decided to get together for Yazmany Arboleda’s first solo show, The New Vitruvians, which opened last week at Issey Miyake’s flagship New York store — designed by Frank Gehry — in Tribeca.
Arboleda, at the tender age of 26, is nothing if not ambitious. Choosing to show amidst the work of notorious shape-shifters Issey Miyake and Frank Gehry might seem a daunting prospect to some. But for Yazmany, the idea of trading white walls for high fashion and the undulating steely breaths of Gehry is as much a part of his art as the work itself.
In the centre of each room, the viewer finds the vertiginous pleating and ballooned fabrics of fashion designer Miyake exerting a strange kind of gravitational pull. Miyake made his name in fashion when he successfully developed a technology that meant fabrics could retain their own ‘memory’ by maintaining a pre-ordained shape no matter how you moved in them. This effect is wonderfully balanced by the sculptural installation of architect Frank Gehry, which sails overhead. Best known for his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, Gehry uses his “comfort” medium of titanium to suspend the viewer in a silent underwater world. We half expect to find the shapes swaying while we stand still; this becomes a powerful — perhaps too powerful — setting in which to be contemplating art of a different kind.
Arboleda studied Architecture in Washington DC, Fashion at Parsons School of Design, Industrial Design in both Milan and London, and Urban Planning in Barcelona. You could argue that this makes him a kind of artistic schizophrenic. But to have ended up making art, in the end, seems a natural fit when you consider the context in which he operates and displays his work.
The work on show is essentially a new kind of portraiture – one that picks apart the concept of beauty and puts it back together in a way that never seems to add up to what we expect. Where Da Vinci examined cadavers to uncover beauty and symmetry in his Vitruvian Man, Arboleda has used a complex lifecycle of photographic and print techniques to piece his “beautiful machines” back together.
Each portrait is a deliberately engineered attempt at perfection. The artist has taken a series of glossy photographic portraits of young people from all walks of life, and reduced each one down on the same simplified dot matrix – the kind we would find if we were to enlarge a newspaper clipping many times over. Details become blurred in close-up; you need to back away to see the image you remember. But Arboleda takes the process one step further, almost entirely crippling our ability to decode the “beauty” in front of us.
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I suppose that’s what we should expect from any creative polymath – an idea filtered through many ways of seeing. What’s particularly interesting and disturbing about Arboleda’s work is that the process of examination has ultimately stripped his portraits of their dimension, their humanity. You’re moving closer to see more and in fact seeing less; moving around to get a better view and finding your view obstructed by the medium. We expect a richness and depth that simply isn’t there.
Scale is obviously an obsession, too. Big ideas always need big spaces to play themselves out. I remember watching the artist on many nights, months ago, as he painstakingly fitted hundreds of neon spheres into precision-cut perspex sheets; these sheets would eventually form the 3 dimensional “canvases” on which the Vitruvians would be printed. The effect is controlled and deliberate.
So what’s next for Arboleda? Paying off his substantial first show debt will be a priority. But his mind is already moving onto bigger things – he plans on taking his innovative process several steps further, printing on even more difficult “terrains” and pushing himself to find the perfect environment for his next show.
Keep an eye out.
