Artistic by design

In recent years there has been a blurring of the boundary between the worlds of design and art. "Design art" objects are usually represented as works of art and are aimed at an audience of art collectors.

Neo-Graphics, an exhibition currently on show at the Bat Yam Institute of Plastic Art attempts to broaden the perspective on this trend and to apply it to the world of graphics as well.

Exhibition curators Adi Goldner and Sharon Melamed-Oron have chosen to forego the economic aspect usually present in industrial design and instead focus on using language and concepts from the world of art.

This starts with the title of the exhibition, Neo-Graphics, which is a nod to trends in art with similar names, like neo-Baroque or neo-Renaissance.

The neo usually denotes a new take on an old trend, and artists either draw their inspiration from the original trend or come out against it. The Neo Graphics name therefore establishes the positioning of graphics as an artistic genre that is both independent and part of the historical axis of other kinds of art, as well as a design tool for transmitting visual information.

Participating in the exhibition are artists and graphic designers who probe the boundaries between graphics and art. The curators of the exhibition decided not to indicate a field of expertise next to each participant's name, thereby blurring the boundaries even more.

The works displayed in the exhibition were created not only with purely graphic tools but also in traditional media like painting or sculpture, working in relation to the language of visual communication. For example, on one wall hangs a neon piece in the shape of the Hebrew letter mem, lit up in red - possibly a remnant of a glowing outdoor advertisement or basic exercise in typography. The title of this work by Yoni Shavit is "Miriam" but anyone who is not familiar with his name would not know whether he is a designer or an artist.

The graphic designers among the visitors will recognize the mem as in the font Miriam. The choice of neon emphasizes the mono-linear nature of the font, which is made up of a uniform line, as neon signs require a continuous line.

The disassociation of the letter from its natural place as part of a word or a sentence makes it possible to examine it as a sculptural object and at the same time helps it demonstrate the unique properties of the font.

"Give and Take," a work by Kobi Barchad and Noa Schwartz, is made up of thousands of pieces of colored paper piled up on the floor of the gallery. On each of the pieces of paper has been printed with a different abstract image, in what looks like an exercise in developing a system of visual images from basic formal elements.

The possibility given to visitors of taking one of the pieces of paper from the pile creates a process of development of images that is revealed with every observer and the abstract shapes gradually become a weave of symbols and images like icons or logos.

Guy Saggee's poster "We Did Not Try Hard Enough," one of three posters he is showing in this exhibition, is a somewhat different work. Though the typographic motif is the center of the work, the text in it is not accompanied by an image but is rather itself a complex image.

In this work each letter is a scene from the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel in accordance with the development of the plot and the result ranges between illustration, design and art.

The poster "Zuzushu" by Dan Reisinger, Israel Prize laureate for design, is made up of strongly colored geometric shapes and can be read as an geometrical abstract picture or as a graphic collage.

"Arti Fact X," by Eliahu Diner, is made with both a digital printing technique and oil on canvas. It comes out as a kind of scene from a film projected on a blurry screen on which some of the pixels do not show the information properly.

The intentionally flawed pixels maintain a single color, which look on the screen like a colorful rectangle and ostensibly show the observer the basic unit of the painting. The treatment of the single pixel is not by chance and it can be seen as a representation of the blurring between art and design.

The transition of elements from the digital world into the concrete world has been another characteristic of design in recent years. It derives primarily from the fact that the computer, with all its applications, has replaced the entire set of working tools from the past and has become a means of personal expression.

At the same time, the world of art has made space for the digital tools alongside the traditional techniques. Though the exhibition is modest and is not located in a central space, it is more daring than one might think because it marks out a future and perhaps already a present in which the question of whether something is art or design is no longer relevant.