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Art in the home environment

The design work of Studio Metaplasi aims to incorporate the spirit and ideas of
a number of different languages of aesthetic expression and a variety of techniques,
both old and new, manifested within free and spontaneous visual relationships
as applied to both the decorative and utility objects in our daily environment.
A variety of materials, complex syntheses of forms, rhythmic representations, sections
of decorative elements or motifs are all integrated into a new fusion of taste, giving
a fresh expression to familiar household objects. Thus, though the use of the object
may remain the same, often with functional innovations and improvements, the image
is changed becoming more playful, inspired by the imagination and the dream-pictures
of fantasy. In this way a fairytale world is created giving us surprising and fresh
directions in the history and pattern of development in aesthetic taste.
The alienation of the applied arts from the principles and purpose of function
as inherited in this century from the fathers of modern art, whose ideas on the main
stemmed from the Bauhaus, happened to coincide with the more general crisis in the
art world during the decade of the 70's. Up until about that time, the general climate
affected artists, architects and designers in a manner that made them face the visual
image ideologically. Consequently they could bypass the authenticity and significance
that can be found in fundamental and basic forms of aesthetic communication.
For the post-war avant-garde, the spirit of modern art, exemplified in a variety of ways,
can in all its forms of expression and visual manifestations be found in the environment.
Science and technology, like the infrastructure of a building, furtively underlie all artistic
expression. Consequently, from the decade of the 60's onward a strong inclination
appears towards the dissolution of the earlier aesthetic related to the object
and towards emphasizing more the intellectual and psychological aspects of art. In the
area of design and applied arts, everything superfluous, every element and form that
does not directly express the function of the object is discarded.
However history has a way of bringing unexpected developments. In mid-70’s
the art world began reacting violently and with irony towards the political crises that
had gone towards disintegrating the established points of the ideological reference
with which artists had identified throughout the 20th century, and which were now
placed elsewhere in unidentified directions.
As a result, the art world came to be constituted by a number of differing,
often opposing tendencies. Neo-expressionism and revivals of even earlier periods
reappeared. At the same time, both in thought and in practice, there is a tendency
to salvage values and images from all periods of the history of civilization, which are
then combined without any evaluation of the underlying ideas into a multi-faceted mode
of expression. However, there is a common characteristic to all these tendencies:
the desire by artists to revive a more immediate and direct relationship to their painting
or sculpture.
Architecture followed a parallel path, a path of the fantastic and the surreal.
The building and its environment are now designed as an integral whole,
symbolically relating images and rhythms, and emphasizing the creation of original
and de-personalized space. Thus the ideological significance of the individual’s unique
relation to his/her environment has led many artists and architects to become involved
in the world of utility and function and hence objects of daily use.
Towards the end of the 70's, an important exhibition, Biennale 80, was organized
in Venice. It brought together a large and greatly differing variety of proposals
by architects from all over the world, manifesting a spirit which validated the acute
observation that had been made sometime back by one of the most avant-garde
of architectural critics, E.N. Rogers, who stated that it was necessary for contemporary
architecture “to close its bill with tradition.”
The tradition of the Bauhaus was founded on beliefs based on an idealized image
of society, which was somehow incorporated in the Golden Mean and then applied
and formulated in the environment in a directly austere and strictly functional manner.
Today's tendency, on the contrary, is to reject the uniformity of this austere simplicity,
by inventing and creating strange and varied combinations, and forming multicolored
retorts to the conservative past with elements gleaned from the world of the decorative
arts.