ART REVIEW 2010

The process itself remains proprietary, preserving the mystery and magic of creation. The power is in the secret and the secret is in the power of that moment of aesthetic arrest that stops us dead in our tracks with delight and wonder at the emergence of something totally novel. We haven't seen anything like it before. It heralds a vast new potential in design, miraculously without any “laying on of hands.” Yet it is infused with the spirit of its creator.

“The invited guests, and art aficionados of the GARTEL sculpture unveiling were absolutely stunned,” said Norsham Blasko, President of The Connector Group who organized the presentation. “Mr. Gartel has been a pioneer of this art form for over thirty years,” declared Ms. Blasko. “Gartel defined it then, and he is redefining now.”

“What is equally amazing is how the young artists have so much respect for GARTEL,” acknowledged Blasko. “He is a true legend and deeply respected,” stated Carly Ivan Garcia, an emerging digital artist from California who was part of the evening’s festivities at the National Hotel. “He really did change the world,” said Robert Harris, another emerging talent. “He is doing it all over again.” “Absolutely amazing, 35 years later.”

Rapid Prototype Printing

“We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.” --Marshall McLuhan

No single tool has exceeded the capacity of the microchip for shaping our electrified world through what Frank Lloyd Wright called the spiritual marriage of form and function. Changing our world utterly, it has given birth to the whole spectrum of digital media – a vast potential that is still being unpacked by artists and audience, alike. Digital 3D is breakthrough technology that moves beyond modeling, simulation, replication and fabrication into the visionary realm of fine art.  Applications include direct metal printing, as well as other high tech composites.

Every media requires that we bend our will to its capacities and limitations. We must express ourselves within its constraints. The magic word of power for the 2010s is “3-D.” We’ve seen this in the unprecedented success of the blockbuster film “Avatar” and the imitators sure to follow. 3D TV is the hot-ticket item of the emerging decade. But the “first” of any new genre must always stand alone in its class as a window to the future. It cannot be usurped.

This is so for Gartel’s breakthrough work, “Auto Motion” sculpture. Known for his digital pioneering print and film/animation work, Gartel began “thinking” in 3-D at the end of the “Naughties” decade and found the technology had finally caught up with his vision once again, as it did in the mid-70s in the birth of digital media.

Nevertheless, simply having the technical means at one’s disposal doesn’t mean you can create great art. It requires solving not only the technical problems, but designing, structuring and creating a balance that encodes our current needs for a unique cultural experience.

When finished, the solution must be beautiful or it is meaningless. Further, technical disaster can strike at any point of the expensive rendering process, just as the wrong stroke can ruin a fine marble sculpture, or like a bronze casting can go awry ruining the wax model. Delicate digital sculpture can also be destroyed during removal from the mother matrix.

3D printing is the process that makes physical objects from virtual CAD models or math files.  There are many different ways to do it, but they all work by building up models one layer at a time.  It's not a carving process. Computer-controlled mills can be used to cut a design out of a solid block of material, but that method doesn't work well for designs which have a lot of undercutting where casting is out of the question.

This is an additive process using a printer that uses “plastic” rather than “ink.” Millimeter by millimeter the printer passes a coating, building up one layer at a time to make the object. The photographic quality, resolution, and detail is like nothing anyone has ever witnessed in a three dimensional form.

Different 3D printing processes use different materials for “the build” in proprietary ways. The burgeoning market is highly competitive. Each layer of the toolpath prints a fine addition to the form, creatinging it from the void. It builds high resolution layers to produce ‘burnable’ models in plastic, metal or wax. It has a vocabulary of its own: stereolithography, metal-printing, laser-activated binders, and airspace, for example.

Mobius Strip Racetrack

“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” -- R. Buckminster Fuller

Gartel’s digitally-informed solution for modeling the dreamscape weaves together psychology and technology. His answer to the problem is direct. It addresses the audience as well as his current creative passion for supercars, making a new visual language accessible because it is already understood. And he does so with the magic that requires no overt physical expression, but one that fuses the ephemera of computing power and vision into a lasting moment of art history. He’s done it before and he did it again, creating a masterwork while breaking new design ground.

It isn’t easy to wrap your mind around the abstraction of an algorithm in virtual or visual terms. 3D modeling is a tedious, technical process with a steep learning curve. You have to decode it. Yet, the work retains his undaunted signature and mystique without being obscure, trendy or stylish. It is as if his works lifted from the 2D of print or film to inhabit the multidimensional world in which we live and breathe. It inhabits the same accessible space we do. We know it is right, because it is, indeed, beautiful.