Tanatilsur

With TANATILSUR & TANATIRIUB, Nick Ervinck explores how to merge fluid lines and colours. Using traditional African clothing and masks as source materials, he created highly detailed images with multiple substantive layers and visual principles, including virtual scratches that echo the real-world marks that add poetry and vulnerability to classic sculpture. He incorporated rich African colors as well as luminous Art Nouveau lines, and elements of ancient Mayan and Inca art. The interplay between all these cultural heritages creates a hybrid that is both new and deeply familiar.

The creation of movement in this series reveals Ervinck’s fascination with futurism. It is easy to spot a historical debt to the famous Light-Space.

Modulator by Moholy-Nagy, or the imagery of Georges Vantongerloo that dealt with light and energy.

The balanced use of old and new, the constant reference to past cultures and present technologies are in line with Henry Moore’s philosophy and practice.

Moore was a frequent visitor to the British Museum’s world artefacts collection, and expressed surprise each time at the power of other cultures’ visual languages.

He analysed and refined every shape and line and opened the way to a purist approach to sculpture.