La Valeur de la vie.

À la recherche des villes radieuses.

[The Value of Life – In Search of Radiant Cities]

photo collages, fine art print on dibond, anti-reflective glass framed, Hubert Blanz, 2019–2024

Shore leaves - Urban phenomenologies

Annette Südbeck

In his series of works, The Value of Life – In Search of Radiant Cities (2019–2024), Blanz deals with Paris’s new cities (villes nouvelles) and banlieues. Again, due to its sheer scope of more than 4,000 photos taken during a three-month stay in Paris as basis for digital photo collages, his research is striking. From the planned cities on the outskirts of Paris Blanz has preferably chosen those housing complexes that constitute a radical setting not only in terms of modern urban planning, but which thanks to their postmodern characteristics and landmark nature contrast strongly with the functional buildings of the 1960s and 1970s. Among the portrayed objects, for instance, is the residential complex Les Espaces d’Abraxas by the Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill – a monumental building completed in 1984 and designed as “Versailles for the people”, whose façade facing the courtyard with its antique-like columns, Renaissance Tempietti made of precast concrete components, and mirrored half-columns appears both noble and oddly surrealistic. In place of almost 40 featured ensembles of buildings, Les Arènes de Picasso by Manuel Núñez should be mentioned here, a similarly theatrical place, which is known for its two distinctive tower discs that are set on the opposite sides of an octagonal square and envisage the allegory of sunrise and sunset.

Today, these planned cities have degenerated into ghettos and deprived areas with high unemployment and crime rates while the dreams of a better life linked to their construction have been crushed. Blanz concentrates less on concrete living conditions or the failure of a social vision, but rather on the futuristic potential and energy that these gigantic housing complexes still possess. His collages embrace the ideas of Postmodernism such as the mix of styles, the use of historical elements, and an ironical playful approach to established building types. Details of the buildings, which he has captured from all possible angles in his photographs are used as components for ornamental patterns that play on the same compositional principles as architecture: repetition and reflection. The photographic images are tilted, turned, and blended into each other. The geometrical complexes and territories that result from his imaginative approach to the reproduced surfaces of house façades and walls are evocative of cityscapes in computer games. The artificial pictorial spaces are complex labyrinths with various levels, grotesque, infinite alignments and contradictory perspectives in which gravity sometimes seems dissolved. Due to the means of montage, their spatial entity is irrevocably suspended. Like in a kaleidoscope, the characteristics of their surroundings, their shapes and colours can easily be recognised in the individual fragments, but their combined effect carries viewers off to other, imaginary spheres. The above-mentioned ambivalences, described as typical for Blanz’s oeuvre, that oscillate between an abundance of variants, which is both comprehensively documented and offers no orientation whatsoever, and between a materiality that is authentic and linked to the digital matrix alike, are valid here too. They are furthermore added another level: that of the ambivalence between the factuality of architectural details and the creation of a utopia. Utopia as in the literal translation of the Greek term as “no place”. Made of elements of reality, Blanz creates new cities that exist nowhere. Although they are from this world, they are unearthly, fantastical places. His journey through the satellite cities just as his voyage on Darwin’s trails oscillate between reality and virtuality. Once again it is evident how clearly his work represents a contemporary experience of the world with all its contradictions, where a shift from the real to the virtual world takes place continuously, from one moment to the next, and the perception of materiality surrounding us seamlessly transitions to the materiality of computer worlds.

Abstract by Annette Südbeck from: Shore leaves in Hubert Blanz – In Search of Radiant Cities, from p. 46, VfmK Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2022.

Translation: Jeanette Pacher, Vienna