.jpg&w=630&h=390 "Carlos Maciá at the Pavillon Suisse")
The Pavillon Suisse is a students’ residence that was built by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret between 1931 and 1933 in Paris’s Cité Universitaire and is fully consonant with Le Corbusier’s concerns and projects for lower-income housing. It has a simple appearance – a pure rectangular prism-shaped slab supported by 3.80 m piers and on which an angular building rests – and was one of the first experiments with dry wall construction in France. It was declared a historic monument on 16 December 1986.
Curated by Maribel Nadal Jové, the exhibition is a specific project commissioned from the artist by the Fondation Suisse and consists of four interventions in different parts of the building which illustrate different aspects of his work.
Chalk – Piers: The use of piers was one of the five points of the new architecture advocated by Le Corbusier. They provided the building suspended on them with a new space that could be used for recreational or meeting areas. Using red chalk Carlos Maciá produces a monochrome pictorial intervention on all the piers, highlighting this special and characteristic element of Le Corbusier’s architecture, which stands out against the green of the surrounding gardens.
Marker Pens – Windows: The ground floor of the building was designed as a reception hall and common rooms. Completely glazed with large windows, it brings the outdoors inside and vice-versa. To facilitate this visual transition the artist draws the exterior on the windows using marker pens and from there plays at re-drawing the mark left from the inside, adding to it the reflection of the outside. To enhance the global action he also draws on the indoor glass of the reception area.
MarkersSeries – Original Room: The foundation preserves a room with the original furniture by Le Corbusier. In it Maciá creates a Project Room with his series of Markers, adapting them to the furniture. The Markers consist of sheets of industrially lacquered aluminium that are bent, crumpled and folded using the artist’s strength to make three-dimensional structures which he then paints with industrial marker pens. These new spaces for pictorial intervention created by Carlos Maciá oscillate between painting and sculpture, thus exploring the boundaries of the medium.
Polyurethane – Corridor: Le Corbusier made a mistake in the design of the building: the students’ rooms faced south and were too hot in sunny weather. Twenty years later this led him to fit Venetian blinds in an attempt to alleviate the problem. He also used sheet lead to try to soundproof the rooms, but to no avail. The artist’s action consists in using a material commonly employed in insulation and soundproofing – foam rubber – around the whole perimeter. On the one hand, he explores the idea that attempts at innovation such as those of Le Corbusier can fail and, on the other, he shows the spectator a material that is usually concealed from sight.
Curated by Maribel Nadal Jové, the exhibition is a specific project commissioned from the artist by the Fondation Suisse and consists of four interventions in different parts of the building which illustrate different aspects of his work.
Chalk – Piers: The use of piers was one of the five points of the new architecture advocated by Le Corbusier. They provided the building suspended on them with a new space that could be used for recreational or meeting areas. Using red chalk Carlos Maciá produces a monochrome pictorial intervention on all the piers, highlighting this special and characteristic element of Le Corbusier’s architecture, which stands out against the green of the surrounding gardens.
Marker Pens – Windows: The ground floor of the building was designed as a reception hall and common rooms. Completely glazed with large windows, it brings the outdoors inside and vice-versa. To facilitate this visual transition the artist draws the exterior on the windows using marker pens and from there plays at re-drawing the mark left from the inside, adding to it the reflection of the outside. To enhance the global action he also draws on the indoor glass of the reception area.
MarkersSeries – Original Room: The foundation preserves a room with the original furniture by Le Corbusier. In it Maciá creates a Project Room with his series of Markers, adapting them to the furniture. The Markers consist of sheets of industrially lacquered aluminium that are bent, crumpled and folded using the artist’s strength to make three-dimensional structures which he then paints with industrial marker pens. These new spaces for pictorial intervention created by Carlos Maciá oscillate between painting and sculpture, thus exploring the boundaries of the medium.
Polyurethane – Corridor: Le Corbusier made a mistake in the design of the building: the students’ rooms faced south and were too hot in sunny weather. Twenty years later this led him to fit Venetian blinds in an attempt to alleviate the problem. He also used sheet lead to try to soundproof the rooms, but to no avail. The artist’s action consists in using a material commonly employed in insulation and soundproofing – foam rubber – around the whole perimeter. On the one hand, he explores the idea that attempts at innovation such as those of Le Corbusier can fail and, on the other, he shows the spectator a material that is usually concealed from sight.