Picasso & Corbusier in Federico Babina’s “Artisect” (all images courtesy the artist)
What if the day Picasso and Le Corbusier had spent wandering the Unité d’habitation in Marseille turned into a real structural collaboration? Italian illustrator Federico Babina has imagined such collisions of visual artists with architects in a series called Artisect.
“The project’s main idea is to reinterpret famous paintings using a brush soaked in architectural tints,” Babina explained in a statement. The 25 images, brought to our attention by Designboom, include a “Wassily”-like Kandinsky pulled into a Frank Lloyd Wright-esque design, and the alien forms of Jan Kaplický finding themselves at home in Salvador Dalí’s strange world. David Hockney’s “A Bigger Splash” has its poolside modernist home upgraded to a Richard Neutra. Picasso and Le Corbusier aside, the juxtapositions are based purely on style rather than time period or actual relationships between the figures. Some are more successful in their mergers than others — some Christo fabric hangs like poorly selected curtains on a Shigeru Ban structure.
Babina has previously brought his midcentury-influenced illustrative style to series like Archist, where he envisioned buildings constructed by famous artists, and Archimachine, with countries being operated by an elaborate architecture of gears and machinery. It’s all very playful, but the Artisect experiments do give a different way of considering two forms of artistic authorship side by side.
Babina shared some of the Artisect images with Hyperallergic, reproduced below:
Federico Babina, “Artisect”
Federico Babina, “Artisect”
Federico Babina, “Artisect”
Federico Babina, “Artisect”
Federico Babina, “Artisect”
Federico Babina, “Artisect”
Federico Babina, “Artisect”
Federico Babina, “Artisect”
Federico Babina, “Artisect”
View more of Federico Babina’s Artisect series on his website.
This is a perfect balance and great writing on the thought of relation between artist and architects.