brettworks

“Conventions change to reflect wider changes in the culture, but what is worth underlining here is how the ideas that we have about things have always been constructed starting from the concrete uses of the things themselves” (104).

“This is how our collective imagination is constructed: an idea appears, takes shape, is liked, begins to be used by people, by artists, by designers and by directors, and gradually – perhaps because it is more suited than others to survive – it becomes a shared archetype” (668).

“colour is today not only a perception or a quality of things but a psychological category that exists bound up with ways of producing, distributing and narrating it” (669).

“we look at representations of the rainbow from late antiquity, it is composed of only two colours, usually orange and green. Every era ultimately has its own perceptual regime, that is to say the way we look at what is around us” (670).

“For their part, art and design are dominated today by two powerful chromatic models. On the one hand, we have the legacy of the didactic, modernist, Gestalt tradition that comes from Itten, Albers and Arnheim, determining the way in which colour is taught in Western schools; on the other, there is the new knowledge being increasingly disseminated by neuroscience. However fascinating and essential, neither one of these two approaches seems sufficient for understanding underlying, complex aesthetic languages. Art teaching addresses the functioning of colour within works, concentrating on the internal dynamics of compositions; neuroscience has instead shifted the interest from the works themselves to the brain, claiming that the experience of colour is within the mind of the beholder. In both cases, the two most important elements for understanding art are ignored: social context and history” (672).

“technique is not simply a means for achieving something but becomes over time the way in which we think about materials, according to the possibilities and limitations of the historical and geographical conditions in which we find ourselves living and operating. The sinuous and helical plastic forms of Francesco Borromini’s architecture, for example, were due to the fact that he studied the volumes of his buildings by modeling them in wax: certain curves can only be produced by moving the thumb in a malleable substance, and it would be highly unlikely that we could arrive at them by using a ruler and compass” (349).

“The experience of working with wax feeds directly into technique, thought and invention. Ideas – whether they are artistic, to do with design, or stylistic – are not born in the abstract but in the process of confronting real problems. Borromini has acquired through actual practice and engagement with materials what we might call a ‘mental tool’” (677).

“mental tool is a way of reasoning that has a precise characteristic: it came from a concrete situation we had to deal with. It does not typically occur in the mind of an individual maker but is likely to involve an entire
society” (677).

“we could say that our perceptual ambience is the set of collective historical, social and technical skills with which we live” (678).

“Technique has to do with history. Which is why the way in which we use it is always a moral problem” (680).

“A Note on the Illustrations. Unlike in the classic editorial model, in which works of art are reproduced in their entirety, in this book the images are presented in the form of details, sections or patches, and without any captions. A detail from a famous painting appears side by side with a technical procedure; a historical document finds itself next to a character from a film – suggesting assonances, appositions, and possible links
between different worlds. The works involved are presented more as evidence of ways of thinking than as works of art. For this reason, the way in which the book is arranged is as an integral part of the text: its design is already a point of view on its subject. The idea is to provide a figurative apparatus running parallel to the text that will prompt an articulated look at the images, rendering fruitful the visual syncretism that is already
the norm through use of the internet and social media. It is up to the reader, if they choose, to make further links – imaginative and personal – with the help of the works in the following list of illustrations” (721).

Riccardo Falcinelli, Chromorama (2025)