Portrait © Courtesy the artist

Vincent Schneider: Hi Ivan! We are such fans of your work and really happy to be able to offer a limited set of hand coloured 3D-prints to our collectors.

I’d like to talk with you about your recent works and in particular this edition.

I imagine you are creating your works in zero gravity or they grow by themselves after you have manipulated their DNA. Are your sculptures generated procedural or do you compose them out of of digital clay?

Ivan Perard: The works are brain – grey matter. So it all starts out like that: gooey, cloud-drippy and virtual. I manipulate a simple mesh quickly, from rough platonic non-ideals to a 200ish vertex low-poly configuration, that can be a bent hairpin through a lip-balm with a slice of lemon. As a volume. Then more targeted sculpting takes place, cutting, twisting, extruding and re-meshing until it speaks object to me. In that space you’re right, the work is floating, without scale and orientation, without mass or physicality in front of my inner eye. It’s a very quick improv. I’d rather link it to sculpting sounds with a synthesizer and plugins. It’s actually the waveform, but also actually what your ears are hearing. Later I displace that simple surface with grayscale patterns generated by a randomiser I’ve been feeding, but at that stage I’ve got known reference objects around me in the computer for scale, to guide the transformation stage to the physical.

VS: How much Sci-Fi do you think we need in our lives?

IP: All of it, it’s modern fable.

VS: Your works seem to be part of an interstellar fleet of ships that are living organisms theirselves rather than vessels for human or alien beings. Are they relatives?

IP: They are entities, yes, visions of self-thinking, self-replicating grey sparkling matter. Ideal, but not modernism’s ideals, their ideals, perhaps fleeting and temperamental; individual. On the question of whether they could be vessels: I think yes. I just need a little bit more production to go planet-sized with them just yet.
The questions that interests me, are questions of meeting the “alien”, the “foreign”, the different, in a way as a preparation for embracing what’s to come, and what’s been happening in our world. I believe there’s a group of artists channeling Otherness these years, as a way of dealing with something observed in societies, as a mirror to how similar we actually are, through our differences. I believe channeling that Otherness is a way of healing. “Unbekannte Dinge sind Lebenselixier” as Jo Penca puts it in a recent performance at Haus der Kunst in Munich.

VS: The unknown certainly is very attractive! I’m currently reading Roadside Picnic by the Strugatzki brothers and am fascinated by the concept! Forms of existence unknown to us yet so desired and longed for, actually just passing by, stopping only briefly and then leaving behind all these anomalies and unidentified objects which then affect almost all areas of our human civilization. It sounds like you managed to have a Roadside Picnic in your studio quite frequently!

IP: It’s the book that is the basis of the Tarkovsky movie, right? Stalker. There’s so many streams from fiction, and in essence maybe one could point out the totally undervalued philosophical concept of curiosity or novelty. While Kant can’t figure out what to do with it, and Grimm’s Brothers advice against it, we’re not living in the middle ages anymore and need to live a different perspective by necessity.



VS: Exactly! Could you tell us a little bit about the concept of your edition?

IP: After showing 10 new sculptures at the MAK Vienna Biennale, I wanted to explore a displacement closer to an intimately known configuration of shape. So as intimately as possible: A displacement of a human body. At the moment now – in my studio, there are hordes of displaced bell-sprouting human heads with techno orchid leaves, drinking from straws everywhere, so this edition is a steppingstone towards that, perhaps also as a mental bridge from abstracts into a future body. When the hand came off the 3D printers printbed, we immediately started playing with it, it gestures so quickly. It became an extension of the furniture and the space, as if the apartment had in between us gotten an avatar, or communicative link, somewhere to interface. I think I liked passing forward that gesture, to have multiple walls reach out towards their inhabitants in an edition.

VS: Thank you very much Ivan! (shaking hands)

https://contemporary-artist-things.com/collections/catalogue/products/ivan-perard