POSTNATURAL CRETTO
This object was inspired by the artworks of Alberto Burri, from whose Cretto series it is named.
"The Cretto series was executed between 1970 and 1979. Its nomenclature derives from the French term craquelure, which describes the spindly web of fissures that traverse the surfaces of ageing paintings. Though craquelure is generally considered undesirable, here Burri valorizes it, using what many consider a detriment—paint’s proclivity to dry and flake—to achieve a novel aesthetic.
An avid admirer of Quattrocento art, Burri conceived the ageing effects observable in Old Master paintings as textured topographies, rather than self-effacing decay.
Focused by the monochrome—each Cretto is a uniform shade of black or white—the series demonstrates the physicality of paint, transforming pigment from a means of illusion into a vehicle for sculptural relief."
[Levi Gorvy, adapted]
Postnatural Cretto conceives a computational simulation of erosion as a technique to achieve an impression of materiality by synthetic means. The artefact seems at the same time digital and material, natural and artificial, born and made. The intention is to retain this visual ambiguity, to show how advancements in design software and technology allow to explore complex shapes and patterns, whose appearance would be intuitively associated with the physical, material, analogue, instead of the digital and synthetic.
As Burri proceeded by layering canvas with a mixture of kaolin, resin, zinc white pigment, and polyvinyl acetate, which cracks as it dries, and loosely guiding it over time, the simulation employed in Postnatural Cretto proceeds autonomously on behalf of a set of parameters defined initially by the designer.
Postnatural Cretto shows an alternative to the mainstream aesthetics of digital design and technology, based on smooth surfaces and transparency, made of plastic, glass and steel, by proposing a digital artefact which is instead born out of a generative process, that bears a distinctively organic, visceral, quasi-living synthetic materiality.
This project was also influenced by a fascination for dry, eroded landscapes, and the reading of Dune, the descriptions therein of Arrakis, the desert planet - the Shield Wall, the Ergs, the rock and sand expanses. As such, it can also be interpreted as the map of an alien planet, and reflects the yearning of the author to explore forms of radical diversity in design.
Alberto Burri, Cretto Bianco (1958).