exterior · 2024
The Complex
The challenge
Two problems at once. A shipping container is ribbed steel, vertical corrugations every few inches, each throwing a hard shadow that cuts any painted line into segments, which is why most container art defaults to flat lettering and blocks of color. And the container is long and low, roughly five times wider than it is tall, a shape that fits no upright figure at all.
Most people who walk past this wall read it as abstract, and that is the honest description of it. Forty feet of cobalt and violet folding through salmon and cyan, flat black cut between the bands, nothing that announces itself as a subject. It works as color and movement first, which is what it was designed to do.
There is a figure underneath. A Greek god runs the length of the container, turned on his side and lying along it rather than standing in it, face up, hair and beard streaming off the end. Rotated ninety degrees, a figure that would never fit a wall five times wider than it is tall fits it exactly. The god assembles once you know to tilt your head, and after that the ribbons will not go back to being ribbons.
That is the useful thing to know if you want an abstract mural. Work that reads as pure form does not have to be arbitrary underneath. This one is built on a drawing, which is why the shapes hold together at forty feet instead of turning into decoration.
The corrugation carries it rather than fighting it. Vertical ribs run the full height of the steel and slice every curve into a stack of segments, so each form has to survive being interrupted a dozen times across. Painted with the ribs instead of against them, they read as motion in the hair and as depth in the flat.
Greek subjects have come up here before. Godlike put Neptune, Zeus and Hades across a hundred feet of cinder block on 3000 South in the same blues and violets, nine years earlier.
