Project by:Studio Nucleo
Place: Milan MI, Italy Photographer: Studio Pepe Fotografia
Publications: Yatzer May 11 2017
Boolean is a series of hybrid sculptures that Turin-based art collective Studio Nucleo has created by coupling disparate elements like vintage furniture and cast concrete based on the application of Boolean operators. The series is currently being showcased at FuturDome in Milan — a turn of the 20th century, Art Nouveau building that has been renovated by the International Institute of Futurist Studies into an experimental art space.
Boolean logic, named after English mathematician and computer pioneer George Boole, established the use of operators like “NOT”, “OR” and “AND” that we now use in web searches. It is precisely the application of such operations of subtraction, intersection and union that Nucleo unleashes upon a trove of vintage artefacts like antique timber furniture, bronze sculptures and ceramic plates which were selected from the furnishings of a 1940’s apartment.
The sculptural pieces produced through these operations are enthralling: a leather-upholstered chair is pierced by a concrete mass that magically hovers above the ground, an ornate wooden footboard is bisected by a thin concrete slab, while a slender wooden cabinet has been cut in half, its top part resting on the ground as if the rest of its body has been sunk into the floor, while a concrete block has taken its place on top of the cabinet’s lower half. Perceptually, the resulting artworks, which also include vintage sculptures that have been merged with polished bronze blocks, are not so much the product of bringing together two distinct elements but rather the hybrid offspring of their physical union.
