Estate Living Digital Publication Issue 3 March 2015 | Page 50

50

DESIGN & DECOR

where the artist creates geometrical
abstraction through instinctive need.
Sketching in the graphic design
programmes he was first introduced
to as a design student, Urbanski is a
translator of the digital image into the
object of the painting. Thinking through
the digital is another way the artist
responds to the textures, the colours
and the sensations of 21st century
living. Media, fashion and architecture
inform his shapes and colour choices.
His process connects both to a family
history of artisanal skill and a desire to
question the aesthetic of the machine.
Both these impulses remind me of the
aims of an incredibly influential German
school of design: the Bauhaus, which
focussed on building art’s relationship
to society and technology as well as
finding a process that reunited creativity
with manufacturing.

if they aspire to precision and reject
anything vague and dreamy, this implies
an instinctive repudiation of chaos and
a longing to find the form appropriate
to our times.”
This diary entry of the German Bauhaus
artist, Schlemmer, is superficially useful
to a reading of Urbanski’s works, but
a deeper interrogation would reveal
that, despite Urbanski’s love of art
history, he remains an artist working in
a post-structuralist environment after
modernism.

His art historical inspirations are
reimagined through his work with
contemporary relevance in his
recognition of the current field of
aesthetic experience as one facing an
absence of reality – the real retreats ever
further behind the interactive screen
of new media – and the invisibility of
the presumptions or power structures
Just because something looks digital of language and institutions. His is a
doesn’t mean it was made by a rebellious appropriation of the ‘street
machine. It is the tiny imperfections, art’ medium of the spray can as paint
the strange stray of the spray can or the on canvas. He employs an empathetic
scar of the taped line that remind us of abstraction of modernist architecture
Urbanski’s hand-made and hands-on and he appropriates the formal planes
involvement in the work’s production. of mass culture and architecture in
His meticulous attention to form, a carefully crafted pastiche of art
materials and precision belie a rare historical movements. I asked the artist
artisanal skill. “If today’s arts love the if the train yards are still somewhere
machine, technology and organisation, in his canvases. It was on the trains, he

said, that he first risked stepping back
from a piece (dangerously exposing
himself to the Vandal Squad) to see his
designs without outlines. From there,
his interest in minimalism, colour field
and other formalist art movements
became a growing influence in his work.
I coin the phrase ‘digital formalism’
because of Urbanski’s devotion to the
compositional elements (colour, line,
form and texture) of his digital sketches.
The ultimate compliment to his works
would be to mistake them for being
giant iPads, for then one would have
to explain the arc back into traditional
painting and marvel at his works as
objects translated from the machine.
Contribution: Natasha Norman
Natasha Norman remains a graffiti toy,
but has been writing about art and
ideas from before she completed her
MFA in 2011. She is an independent
artist and academic.
Contact
[e-mail]
www.aurbanski.com
www.salon91.co.za/?tag=andrzejurban