Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

A Close Look at Georges Rousse’s Single-Perspective Installations

Even if the final representation of Georges Rousse’s work is a single-perspective photograph, the French artist is a man of several disciplines. He also considers himself a sculptor, painter, and architect, having transformed nondescript, soon-to-be-demolished spaces into transcendental pieces for decades. A Starbucks at The Cosmopolitan hotel in Las Vegas doesn’t share the same fate as those abandoned buildings, yet even in this bustling hub, Rousse creates a singular moment viewable in just one spot.

Even if the final representation of Georges Rousse’s work is a single-perspective photograph, the French artist is a man of several disciplines. The photographer also considers himself a sculptor, painter, and architect, having transformed nondescript, soon-to-be-demolished spaces into transcendental pieces for decades. A Starbucks at The Cosmopolitan hotel in Las Vegas doesn’t share the same fate as those abandoned buildings, yet even in this bustling hub, Rousse creates a singular moment, viewable in just one spot.




A statement on the artist’s website puts his charge into words: “His raw material is space,” it says. “[ … ] Taking his inspiration from a site’s architectonic quality and the light he finds there, he quickly chooses a “fragment” and creates a mise-en-scène, keeping in mind his ultimate goal, creating a photographic image. In these empty spaces, Georges Rousse constructs a kind of utopia that projects his vision of the world—his imaginary universe.”



Step to the left or the right of this view, and you may find an interesting collection of shapes and shades. You may even find something worth capturing with your own camera. However, in a piece by Rousse, there’s a symphony that can only be truly released at the seat of the conductor. And his knack for creating seemingly simple geometric patterns, even if they are meticulously rendered, gives his works a timeless quality.

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
The word "wallflower" was first used in the early 1800s to refer to a woman without a partner at a dance, presumably sitting against the wall. Today, it represents any person who appears or feels shy and awkward. Southern California based artist Janine Brown captures the feeling of being a wallflower in her dream-like series of pinhole camera portraits, titled "The Wallflower Project."
Korean artist Keun Young Park's torn-paper portraits of floating figures, faces, arms and hands appear to be disintegrating into space. Some pieces are rather explosive, like in her "Dream" series, featuring figures that transform into trees and erupt into clouds of birds. Each image begins as a photograph taken by Park, which she manipulates digitally in Photoshop, then shreds into thousands of tiny pieces only to paste them back together again.
Life truly imitates art in this set of photos of models recreating some of Austrian symbolist Gustav Klimt's most famous paintings. The images were taken earlier this year for the Life Ball in Vienna, Europe's biggest charity fundraiser, which went "gold" in support of people with HIV or AIDS. "To awaken a spirit of optimism, liveliness and activity in every single person - that is the goal," it says at the event's website. Models were costumed and painted as an embodiment of Klimt, whose work featured primarily the female body marked by a frank eroticism, and found success in his later years for his mosaic-like "Golden Phase" paintings.
Doug Fogelson does not use cameras of any kind to create his colorful, x-ray like images of animal and plant specimens. His artwork consists of photograms, made by a method where the artist places an object directly onto film and exposes it to colored light. The final image is a shadow of the original form, which can appear either opaque or having a ghostly translucence depending on the transparency of the subject. The transparency film that is used needs to be exposed in a space with total darkness, a process Fogelson makes repeatedly, and with a high attention to detail.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List