This article was taken from the July 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Pity the modern sculptor: "For new media I'm too classical and for the traditional sculpture world I'm much too new media," Nick Ervinck says. The Belgian artist fuses the practices of both, though, using 3D printers and Renaissance-era technology. Michelangelo, he says, used to "put small scale-models in coffin-like boxes full of water. He ran the water out in stages, leaving an ugly line on the model -- but an ugly line he could use to calculate which parts to sculpt first."
Ervinck does the same digitally, allowing him to make complex sculptures, whether they're small scale and 3D printed, or traditionally sculpted at large scale. He remixes content as well as technique; in Racht, he stitches together ancient Roman busts to create a sentinel that looks like the chess piece of your nightmares. For another piece he reimagined Rubens. "I have respect for the old master, but I don't have any affection."
Ervinck went looking for "blobs" in Rubens's paintings and eventually found them in his female subjects. "It was not my intention to make a fat lady. I looked at the point of view from sculpture, putting a skeleton normally on the inside on the outside." He called the result Sniburtad -- Ervinck's titles typically make more sense when read backwards. "A lot of my new sculptures are built from old sculptures. So you're copypasting, you're transforming, and nobody will recognise them because they're changed. That is the beautiful part of it -- it's not traditional drawing with software, it's a belly feeling."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
