Sass

Play with measurements, move beyond proportions, demolish canons. It’s what the great multi-talented artist Bruno Munari advised, and it’s what Nicolas Sassoon is accomplishing with AVENUE, and before that with INDEX (2016), commissioned by the online platform rhizome.org: his gigantic GIFs, designed to move out of the screen – in this case the banner of Link Cabinet, the Link Art Center’s online gallery, which is hosting Sassoon’s work until 4 June.

The setting seeks to recreate the interior of “Avenue”, an electronic music project founded by the artist and active in Vancouver (Canada) from 2012 to 2015, run by Sassoon himself. The reconstruction of the space is based on his own personal memories.

The impossibility of enclosing AVENUE within the visual limits of the screen forces us to “navigate” the space, which uses a retro style to explore a mental dimension that also draws on black and white graphics to become “a dreamlike and intimate experience, simultaneously ambiguous and imprecise, yet incredibly rich with a multitude of details”, as the introduction to the piece explains.

The project displayed on the Link Cabinet banner is a continuation of Sassoon’s interest in early computer imaging techniques formalised as online artworks, which are often translated into a variety of mediums: digital animation, installations, prints and sculpture. In the GIF, Sassoon has found the ideal tool to give form to memory and restore its dimension of intimacy. The representation of these memories is an opportunity to formulate mental images of architectures, landscapes and other elements into visual forms that are minimal, incomplete, and encoded – Sassoon explains in a conversation with Filippo Lorenzin on Furtherfield‘s platform, referring to his previous project, INDEX (2016).