Start the tour: Six Cellules Catalog essay by Philippe Vergne We are please to present digital images of Absalon’s drawings for each of the Six Cellules, the artist’s last major body of work. The Six Cells (1992) are dwellings made to the artist’s own scale. Combining the square, circle, cube, and cylinder, they draw their inspiration from the spare aesthetic of a monk’s cell, distilled through the reductive vocabulary of Le Corbusier, then further refined in relation to the needs of the artist alone. Each of these settings is a variation of personal space, an expression of the artist's desire to provide ultimate peace, security, and creative inspiration through perfect scale and form. He envisioned, not public projection or the improvement of the human condition, but the intellectual and spiritual intensification of the private domain. From 1987 until he died in 1993 at the age of 29, Absalon created an oeuvre that, in its compression of form and conception, offers an alternative way to process information and experience the world. In the spirit of early modernist architecture, Absalon sought to “elevate the utility and necessity of everyday objects to a principally aesthetic plane.” Like others who have worked at the practical details of utopia, he proposed to alter personal behavior by changing and redesigning all aspects of the built environment; he created a total artwork, geometric, abstracted, and unified by the color white. And yet, his universal vision was designed to fit only a single person—himself. Not included in this exhibition are Absalon's video's. A complement to the pristine and contemplative calm of his constructed surroundings, the videos reveal the artist's struggles. In Noises, he shouts with anguish or rage until his strength is gone; in Battle, he fights violently against an unknown force. Shown in the United States at the Galleries at Moore (November 5–December 12, 1999) Absalon’s work has been shown repeatedly in Europe and in Israel. One of his prototype cells was included in “Premises: Invested Spaces in Visual Arts, Architects, and Design from France 1958-1998,” an exhibition of French artists shown at the Guggenheim in SoHo, NY, October 1998–January 1999.  (Return to top)
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