"I would separate my project in three parts. The essay, the text as image, and the box as an object. The essay comes from a research I did during Foundation, where I was looking to find if other practitioners had explored abstraction in such a rational way, if someone tried to define abstraction as the purpose of their work. Obviously many artists produced abstract paintings, but was it as intentional as what I am trying to do? So I went on reading books and all... but in the middle of the process I realised I only had ideas and nothing tangible or physical. And that's where I thought that it would make sense to use those ideas, and that's why I used the essay itself. So I wrote the essay and right away forgot about its content and started to explore it as an image. Out of the experiments I carried out, printing on the side of the stack was really interesting."
Essay
The essay came from all the research done in the beginning of the project and conclusions gotten from it. I essentially tried to understand how the gradual abstraction of painting styles happened, and why. I also tried to find a practitioner that explored abstraction as a central subject and not as just a tool or medium.
Text as image
Working and looking at the text as an image or shape and not as symbols with a phonetic and written meaning is very hard. And also a center subject of the project.
In order to produce the final object I explored ways of somehow abstracting the text. For the final distortion it was even necessary to count the block of text in milimeters instead of height of the text, number of lines or characters.
Object
The final object became almost as a sculpture. The acrylic box holding the sheets together while showing the distortion of the first page and the slightly abstracted text on the sides of the stack of paper. The 4000 sheets of white paper show height and a heavy mass against the usual lightness paper communicates.
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