Leon Duniec
'untitled no 011b', 2008
31 x 16 x 46 cm, plaster
Leon Duniec
'untitled no 037', 2009
wood, cardboard
Leon Duniec
'untitled no 031' 2009
25 x 13 x 12 cm, cardboard
Leon Duniec
'untitled no 035', 2009
251 x 211 x 195 cm, beecord, wood
"Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it"* - Georges Perec
Leon Duniec, a student at ABK Maastricht, uses materials such as plaster and cardboard to create small-scale three-dimensional objects that look like preliminary models of unrealised sculptures. The forms are simple, reductive and roughly made. The surfaces are left untreated. The colour palette reflects these materials, chalky white, grey plaster and beige cardboard.
The sculptures are untitled and give no hints. Their scale and presentation, usually on plinth, suggest a possible reading as models of industrial buildings, dwellings or public spaces. The simplified spaces are no longer defined by the architectural: doors, windows, floor plans but rather through openings, closures and the articulation of volumes. The artist plays with the negative and positive forms to create non-monumental constructions that seem, somehow, completely functional. Despite the fact Duniec uses the word 'sculpture' to describe his works, it's also telling to view them as maquettes, as rough-hewn representations of ideas, rather than fully materialised ideas
themselves. Models privilege communication through their form over flawless craftsmanship. Unlike sculptures, for the most part, models are produced serially and exist as physical traces of a process that is constantly being redefined.
Duniec, through manipulating volumes, interrogates their spatial qualities. Like the handcrafted sculptures of the American artist Vincent Fecteau, Duniec's works are modest but striking spatial constructions.
"Space" Georges Perec writes, "is what arrests our gaze, what our sight stumbles over: the obstacle, bricks, an angle, a vanishing point. Space is when it makes an angle, when it stops, when we have to turn for it to start off. There's nothing ectoplasmic about space; it has edges, it doesn't go off in all directions (...)" Space is, ultimately immaterial and only by marking, punctuating and delineating it, as Duniec does, can space become form.
* Georges Perec, 'Space', Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Penguin Books, revised version,
1999, p.91
To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here, and visit the artist's own website, leonduniec.com.
Capucine Perrot
)
)
)