Carnovsky: RGB as art
Carnovsky is a Milan based artist/designer duo comprised of Francesco Rugi and Silvia Quintanilla.
I got to know their work by accident, and I was totally impressed by their RGB series, a project started with wallpaper design for the famous Italian wallpaper house Jannelli & Volpi, and then translated also into prints and smaller surfaces. the Jungla series have won a Wallpaper* Design Award 2012 in the Best Wallpaper category.
The project is so called because of the use of the RGB technique, consisting in overlapping three different images, each one in a primary color (Red, Blue, Green). When you look at the overlapped images what you see is a confusing ensemble of lines and shapes, beautiful as an abstract work of art, in which you are not able to separate elements of each single “level”. But through a colored lens or light, it is possible to see clearly the layers in which the image is composed. The filter’s colors are red, green and blue, each one of them serves to reveal one of the other three layers.
This is how the designers explain their inspirational concept:
The represented subject is the antique theme of the metamorphosis intended as an unceasing transformation of shapes from a “primigenial chaos”. For this purpose we have created a sort of catalogue of natural motifs starting with the engravings from natural history’s great European texts, between the 500 and the 700, from Aldrovandi to Ruysch, from Linneus to Bonnaterre. A catalogue that does not have a taxonomic or scientific aim in the modern sense, but that wants to classify both the real and the fantastic, the true and the verisimilar in the way medieval bestiaries did. In each image three layers live together, three worlds that could belong to a specific natural kingdom, but that at the same time connect to a different psychological or emotional status that passes from the clear to the hidden, from the light to the darkness, from the awakeness to the dream.
Currently exhibition of RGB at Jaguarshoes in London.
Ariko
