Amplifying scale

Israeli designer Arik Levy is fond of contrasts. Just in the last five minutes, amidst a small crowd in a Palladian, rational white room in the Italian Veneto, he has enumerated several of them: inside/outside, hard/soft, existing/non-existing, full/empty, brain/heart. The occasion is the inauguration of his most recent work: the Experimental Growth installation, commissioned by the Vicenza-based Fondazione Bisazza, where four different components harmoniously articulate, each subtly occupying a different scale. Not all of them are visible at first, however: upon entering the airy, light-filled room, the presence of a black, shiny monolith imposes itself.

Titled Rock Chamber, this 8 metre-long, 5 metre-wide and 2 metre-high multifaceted polyhedron resembles a meteorite just fallen from space, its dark colour and sharp angles vigorously contrasting with the surroundings. Levy sees it as a natural continuation of his Rock sculptures, a series he has been working on throughout the years, experimenting with several multifaceted shapes and diverse materials. This time, however, the scale has been blown out of proportion, and instead of a quiet, muted presence in a corner of a room, Rock Chamber — slated to become part of the Fondazione's permanent collection — invades the space in a muscular, yet cold and precise fashion. Or as Levy terms it, "instead of us looking at it, it looks at us".



Covered in shiny, minute Bisazza black mosaics dotted with metallic specks, the volume's resemblance to a geode is complete once you are confronted with its interior, an excavated crater which Levy calls a "cave", covered entirely in acid green Kvadrat fabric and illuminated by one of the designer's Fractal Cloud lamps. The chosen few allowed to enter will discover an acoustically isolated, warm, comfortable space where the outside is completely shut out. "We are the primitives from the future," Arik Levy says, pointing out how, in years to come, our immediate surroundings will be "covered by the sands from the Sahara," and future civilisations will wonder at how we were and lived. "This is our future cave," he finally remarks.

Away from the dominating presence of Rock Chamber, the far end of the room reveals three other parts to Levy's installation. In a side area, separated by a set of columns, a video projection displays a rotating wireframe volume, very much alike the black monolith. However, here the solid moves and rotates, hovering in space while changing from solid to wireframe, from blue, to green, pink and a million other colours. Titled Virtual Truth, the video is in fact an interactive installation, reacting to a visitor's presence by changing the projected solid in unpredictable ways. Levy designed it that way in order to confront the rational process of designing with the uncontrolled power of chaos, inadvertently reminding us of our own true scale in the universe.

Science and science fiction converge in the other elements of the installation. In two glass displays, a series of small, caramel-brown 3D printed models present early iterations of the monolith, designed using Virtual Truth and crystallised in time, evoking age-old clay museum relics or discarded lunar rocks. And suddenly, almost inadvertently, the last element of Experimental Growth comes into play, taking some visitors off-balance: the entirety of this side room has been intervened upon, redesigned with delicately crooked angles, transformed into a subtler, whiter, scaled-up version of the geometries invading the entire room.

Confronted with the other permanent installations at the Fondazione Bisazza, Experimental Growth is decidedly alien, and unquestionably breaks with the exaggerated figurative inclination of most other rooms, to a striking effect. The dark tones of the installation's highlight Rock Chamber are not ominous, but mysterious, and are certain to succeed in luring visitor's curiosity, which is undoubtedly rewarded when discovering the monolith's enticing core.

Despite Arik Levy, a man for whom design "is about people, and not objects", this scientific fragment of a possible future could seem overly detached from the physical and warm design objects we are used to seeing characterised as "human." However, its metallic, mineral qualities appeal to a more philosophical notion of what we are made of — the innards of the earth, if you will —, and speak to the symbiotic way in which Levy grasps design. Later on, he shared some pictures of a recent trip to the Carrara quarries, home to the renowned marble that has inspired generations of artists, architects and designers. "It is just like Rock Chamber," he pointed out, showing me images of the undomesticated exterior of the mountain and the contrast with its neatly, rationally and brutally excavated core. "This," he concluded, "this is architecture." Vera Sacchetti (@verasacchetti)