Category Archives: Art

Blindness

Blindness is the second installment of the trilogy of animated architectural narratives created by WAI Architecture Think Tank (Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski to explore the essence of architecture.


Wall Stalker narrated the journey of three characters in search of the essence of architecture. After an exhausting odyssey from a city of icons to a mysterious wall, the wanderers were confronted with a blinding whiteness that not only blurred their hope to find what they were looking for, but put in question their true intentions.

Continuing where Wall Stalker left, the plot is resumed after the characters (now on a first person point of view) are washed in the whiteness of the wall they initially came to see in their search for answers. Once stricken by a white form of agnosia resulting from the purging experience of the mystical wall, the characters are unable to tell if what they think they see is either a memory of times past or unknown possibilities of new paths to be taken. Going through desolated landscapes, the characters face a dichotomy on which path to take: if the one that points to the uncertain abstraction reminiscing of the wall that left them confused or if to the clearly defined urban iconography that can be recognized in the distance. Once drawn by the hypnotizing sharpness of symbolism, the protagonists are sequestered inside Atlas, an urban maze of unremarkable buildings overlooked by four pyramidal monoliths, one of them containing what will make the wanderers discover—against their will—the last part of their journey.

Like Wall Stalker, Blindness is a graphic radiography of the fictional subconscious of architecture. This time using pieces from Jan Garbarek, Eberhard Weber , Agnes Buen Garnås, Rainer Brüninghaus, and Naná Vasconcelos as acoustic landscape the architectural narrative is built once again around twelve chapers / photomontages that depict a journey to find meaning in architecture. The images evolve around fictional landscapes that evoke a new kind of blindness of symbolism and meaning.

http://www.wai-architecture.com
http://www.waithinktank.com

http://cargocollective.com/garciafrankowski

 

WAI Think Tank + Garcia Frankowski= Tumblr!

 

Now you can take a look at an Online Gallery with images from WAI Architecture Think Tank and paintings from Garcia Frankowski.

Intelligentsia will be updated periodically with new images and paintings. Stay tuned!

Garcia Frankowski Goes Online

garcia frankowski online

 

An online catalog of the painting series of WAI directors Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski is now online.  Go to Garcia Frankowski.

Généalogie d’un collage (Cities of the Avant-Garde)

WAI’s video narrative « Généalogie d’un collage » is now available on Vimeo. The video displays the creation of the collage Cities of the Avant-Garde, as well as one of the poems that were developed with the iconic image.

Music:

Asap Rocky “Peso” (2011)

Jan Garbarek & Agnes Buen Garnas “Rosensfole” (1988)

WAI in a Week featured in Moving Cities

Shanghai-based think tank Moving Cities (Bert de Muynck & Monica Carrico) have featured a post on their webpage about a week of WAI. WAI in a Week narrates through descriptive text and a series of images a week of the work, life, and projects of WAI co-founders Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia. WAI in a Week has been divided in two parts. The first one can be accessed here and the second one here.

Jackie Panda at the studio

The Exhibition, Oil on Canvas
from http://garciafrankowski.blogspot.com/

Garcia Frankowski at Shanghai Art Fair

Study No.1
Islands
120cm x 120cm
47 1/4″ x 47 1/4″
Oil on Canvas
2012

Several of the oil paintings made by WAI co-founders Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski have been selected to form part of the Surge Art Fair in Shanghai.

Artworks for upcoming contemporary artist in China will be up for grabs on one of the biggest contemporary art events.
“The eagerly anticipated SURGE Shanghai art fair will make its debut on October 20-21st 2012 at Shanghai’s River South Art Center. Showcasing contemporary artwork from around China, we’re bringing you a diverse mix of oil paintings, limited edition prints, breathtaking photography and hand painted sculptures – with every artwork under 30,000 RMB. Whether you’re a first-time buyer who’s easing into the art world or an experienced buyer who knows what they want, the fair has something that will peak everyone’s interest.”
Dates: Friday October 19th (VIP Preview), Saturday October 20th and Sunday October 21st
Time: 10am to 8pm
Location: River South Arts Center, Shanghai
For more information go here.

Poems of the Avant-Garde

Image

Cities of the Avant-Garde: Three Poems and a Collage
Spread from What About It? Part 2

Cities of the avant-garde
 
A thousand islands float
Where uncommon thoughts coexist.
They hover on the place where they should have collapsed long ago,
Because the avant-garde although dead, could never die.

Imposible fantasies built at unbearable speeds
Vanish from where the sight can reach.
Stopped by the collective mediocrity of a reality that’s too real,
That cuts short the fuel of dreams.

A vast archipelago awaits,
Far from the common horizons and where the light casts shadows.
It was pronounced dead,
But although no heart beat, the avant-garde still could never die.

Towers crawl to the sky,
Like lost verses of dead poets, or the smoke of burned canvases of dead artists.
Modernity melts into air,
And pours back as rain decades later just to be again evaporated.

A redundant struggle endures,
About singular dreams of collectivity that although never lived, are declared dead.
The avant-garde was, is and will be dead.
The avant-garde can never die.

Gray Matter
They are gray,
Always gray.
It’s the gray of the concrete,
The gray of steel.

They are gray as the pavement,
Gray as glass.
Gray as the dust of the wind,
Gray as the mushroom cloud.

Gray floats in the sky,
Gray digs deep in the ground.
Gray is the wall that divides,
Or the cluster that floats over you.

Gray in different tones
Of a Monochromatic palette.
Gray is the favorite choice of the ideal (utopia),
Of the ironic and the cynic.

Gray is not  absolute black,
Nor a milky white.
Gray is gray,
Although gray could be closer to the silent tones of darkness,
Or to the washed away noise of light.

Forms vary, from time to time,
But the color gray remains the same.
Gray is always gray,
It’s the neutral state of radical change.

The Rain
A city fell from the sky
Like a drop of rain
More cities followed up,
And the rain turned into a storm.

First it made a puddle,
Then it flooded into a lake.
The lake turned into an ocean,
With no shore in sight.

The first drops,
Or cities if you want to called them like that,
Looked original, because their forms were unique.

After the first shower stopped,
A second rain started,
This time the drops looked like the first ones.

Image

Cities of the Avant-Garde
Spread from What About It? Part 2

WAI Presents Garcia Frankowski

Study No.2
Islands
160cm x 120cm
63″ x 47 1/4″
Oil on Canvas
2012

In order to explore the potential of painting, WAI co-founders Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia have created Garcia Frankowski, a web portal that displays some of their latest works, studies and explorations on canvas.

Study No.1
Islands
120cm x 120cm
47 1/4″ x 47 1/4″
Oil on Canvas
2012

For more info go to:

For information about the paintings write to:
contact@wai-architecture.com
subject: paintings

Project for the Affirmation of the New No.1
60cm diameter
23 5/8″ diameter
Oil on Canvas
2012

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