Bardula — À propos — Slash Paris

Bardula is a pseudonym, created by an artist born in Zürich in 1965 to a Ukrainian father and a Belgian mother and based in Brussels until 1993, New York until 2002, and Paris ever since.

After studying gold and silversmithing at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and in jewellery workshops, in the early 1990’s, Bardula worked in Brussels and Antwerp creating objects made of precious metal. Their functionality, of secondary importance, served merely to provide thematic direction. An object was not designed to be used, nor a piece of jewellery necessarily to be worn. The aim was to create a relationship between form, matter, light and space, expressed through the transformation of matter into a form that had no other end than itself.

Bardula left Belgium for New York in 1993, where she would remain for almost 10 years. The foundations of her current work would be laid during this period in New York, through her metallic structures stripped of all function and rendered abstract. This constructivist approach, concerned with volumes giving way to space, their architectural arrangement, and research into transparency and gravity, is reminiscent of the Bauhaus and Art Concret, with kinetic resonances.

Since 2012, Bardula has collaborated with an architect and scenographer whom she met in Paris shortly after her return from New York in 2002.

With a degree in architecture from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, it was his attraction to scenographic 3D modelling and light that would lead to the gradual coincidence of his world with that of Bardula, giving birth to a conceptual and technological symbiosis. Bardula’s work is thus conceived and produced by a couple, trained as silversmith and architect, at their studio in the south of Paris.

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“The hybrid nature of my work has emerged in time, placing it at the point at which sculpture, architecture, metalwork and engineering meet. My training as a gold- and silversmith would instil an instructional technique and choice of medium, metal, that would subsequently evolve over the years by way of an autodidactic approach. The contours contain no iconography in the traditional sense of the term, but demonstrate how a system works according to its own laws of construction: the volumes it creates, the spaces it organises, and the contrasts, rhythms and individual tensions it produces, in pursuit of the purely plastic. It is an autonomous creation, in which technique, materials and relationships of scale strive to present an internal vision in concrete form, according to a geometric, mathematical framework. This mathematical schematization of space by geometric construction is achieved by using points to generate lines, lines to generate planes and planes to generate space. Two dimensions morph into a third, creating a structure that evolves in the fourth, with the passage of time. Throughout this development, emphasis is placed on matter itself, on the molecular purity of metal combined with the geometric purity of the straight line and the symmetrical and orthogonal form, as well as its symbiotic relationship with light. By conforming to its inherent characteristics, matter engenders ‘elementary forms’ imbued with universal meaning. These technological and material laws reveal an imaginary reality, determined by the specific properties and functions of each part in relation to its whole.

The use of light draws attention to the correlation between light and matter, as a manifestation of the matter connected with the original explosion, and to the light on which the existence of matter depends. Remaining perceptible after the event, light bears testimony to the existence of this matter after its disappearance. Cyclic light phenomena emphasize the correlation between order and entropy and their mutual appearance within matter and systems. Constructing in order to counter the inevitable deconstruction and to contain, briefly, the entropy which transcends us, and setting matter in contrast to time in order to retain it, to give it meaning beyond the insignificance of the moment, continue to feature among our collective concerns.

Light, through its relationship with metal, is a medium in its own right, forming a component of works and creating volumes. The interdependence of energy, light and matter is expressed in the development of the construction: technically speaking, the segmentation of aluminium structural planes is achieved using quantum light, laser; in formal terms, the constructions examine the propagatory movements arising from the undulatory nature of light; finally, light serves as a graphic and spatial component, visible and intangible. These structures reveal volumes that change with the perspective and colour; it is this shifting of the overall viewpoint which makes it possible to perceive them and, in this sense, they are kinetic works.

The varying colour of the light-emitting diodes (LEDs), sublimated by their reverberation in matter, influences perception of the surrounding space and creates a synergy between form and light. The aim is to examine, by means of a visual geometric language, the relationship between colour, form and light reflection. This arrangement of volumetric figures both real and virtual provides interaction between internal and external space: it becomes a visual perception, an image in which the different layers superimposed on one another create areas of shade and light, establishing a dialogue between surface and depth. It is therefore as much a question of surface and transparency, i.e. of a perceptual phenomenon, as of volume and space, as physical presences."

Bardula.

Paris, December 26, 2018.