More art I like: Charles Round and Matej Kren

I have also come arose the work of Charles Round, a contemporary British artist.

Font Especial, 2005-7
True type font, vinyl on wall
Dimensions variable

Installation view at El Basilico, Buenos Aires

The following is an extract from the ICA's website (link is here)  relating to a recent exhibition of Round's work.

The relationship between line and volume is explored by Round in his typographic work. The artist has created a series of fonts that mimic this formal balance, and which he uses on the posters, hangings and animations that feature within his installations. These 'signs' contain texts that fluctuate in their legibility, overwhelmed by the structure of the font and its grid-like presentation. Containing phrases of romantic excess, their semantic collapse evokes an altered state of perception; the bourgeois refinement of forms and arrangements shifting towards a giddy, transgressive lyricism. Round's Nought to Sixtyproject makes reference to the British sculptor and printmaker Eric Gill (1882–1940), through a phrase lifted from the latter's diaries: “Strange days and nights of mystery and fear mixed with excitement and wonder strange days and nights strange months and years”. Round's use of the text – which operates as a leitmotif throughout the exhibition – evokes Gill's influential work as a typographer, but also the latter's complex persona. During his lifetime Gill presented himself as a deeply religious man, publishing numerous essays on the relationship between art and religion, and encouraging the formation of arts and crafts communities. This worthy image was shaken when the artist's diaries were published in the late 1980s, documenting his adulteries, incestuous liaisons and experiments with bestiality. The confrontation between noble aspirations and transgressive desires that is apparent in Gill's diaries is mirrored in Round's exhibition. 

I think it is interesting that Round deliberately creates a font which is hard to read - while clearly wanting the meaning of the text to be apparent.  This makes the work something of a puzzle for the viewer to decipher.


Another artist working with books is Matej Kren, a Czech artist who builds seriously large structures from old books.  His website (the link is here) says that this is an attempt to convey the increasingly blurred boundaries between fiction and real life:   "His work not only touches on very contemporary problems, such as erasing the boundaries between reality and fiction, memory and the present, but also on classic themes in art - the relation between inner and outer, the part and the whole. Typical of his work is a searching for a complexity of content expressed in a monumental and comprehensible language."

Book Cell, Centro de Arte Moderna - Foundation Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal, 2006. 

Passage, Bratislava, 2005

Passage, Passage, GMPassage, GMB,PassagePP Bratislava, 2005B, Bratislava, Bratislava

I like these works because of the way in which Kren uses the books in such a simple way, rather like building blocks, and makes such enormous constructions out of them.  They remind me of library stacks,  where you can get lost among the books and lose track of being among writing, but rather among buildings.  The Passage reminds me of old libraries, like the Chained Library at Hereford Cathedral, here...

or the wonderful sixteenth century library at Trinity College Dublin.