My basic, stupid take on Mondrian is that he’s one of the hardest artists to see. I’m not saying you have to climb a lot of stairs or find your way in a maze. I’m not saying that curators like to bombard you with dry ice when you’re near. I mean, once I see Mondrian — the classic grid-based Mondrian work — it’s always hard for me to really take it. His squares, lines and primary colour blocks have been used by the advertising and design industries. He now belongs to Billboard. He is on cosmetic bottles, dresses and iPhone cases. He’s even retro – not 1930s retro, 1980s vintage. (These are probably all excuses: actually Mondrian just made me feel a little stupid.)
Oh, and he’s also the kind of guy who gets someone to say, “Okay, I could have done it. That. Give me a ruler and a bunch of red, black, blue and yellow paint and I can knock Mondrian out all day. “Look at those elements of the classic Mondrian – again, the easiest grid-based L’Oreal Mondrian to remember. Black lines. Solid blocks of color. This Mondrian must be an MS Paint creature?
So even at this level, touching the artwork is a service to someone like me. The lines and blocks look simple, but working on your own Mondrian is surprisingly difficult to do. You can have all the parts of L’Oreal Mondrian, the lines, the right colors, and it just doesn’t look right. Actually, getting it to look right is really tricky.
Please, Touch the Artwork is a fun puzzle game inspired by abstract art. But I think that’s another story.this is trying to get you Look Revisit art as part of an understandable lineage, understand the way it has evolved and changed form over time, and speak in your own way.By using three abstract paintings as the basis for three puzzles, please touch the artwork to encourage you to dabble process Abstract art, which is a part of art that we don’t usually see. You may be trying to solve some problem in the game to pass a level, but you are also making choices and thinking critically. The first wall to appreciate abstract art—you know, the art is done, hangs in the gallery, you can only get so close—that wall collapsed. Please, touch! See what you can do. For me, it was a revelation.
Puzzles are good, sometimes great. Don’t spoil the artwork too much, but in the first set of puzzles you’ll be working to match those classic Mondrian compositions – making the canvas on the right look like the work on the left. You create lines. You touch the blocks to apply color to any continuous wall, as if the whole thing is an artistic cellular automaton. There are hints when you get stuck, but the core fun is experimenting, canvassing between states, and saving disaster. In between, you get some history, anecdotes, and theories.At one point, you’ll see a cutscene in which you can see Mondrian gradually moving towards his real presence Mondrian – The natural world has become more angular, with wild animals giving way to human designs, almost straight lines, almost flat colors. Yet you also see, looking back, that line and abstraction were also there from the beginning – the pinwheel he painted in 1908 or whatever was already beating in edge and color as if it aspired to rupture and become pure shape and tone.
Each of the three puzzle series has such insights. In the second, very broadly, you unify the different shapes by tapping them on the intersection of a series of paintings inspired by Broadway Boogie Woogie. It’s all about understanding the rules of the grid – where it will put a piece you’ve put into it – and it’s also about making sure you find the correct order of moves. Sometimes, it’s a little too much for me. In the third series, you start out by playing a game similar to Blockade or Snake, collecting letters as you walk through a vast area of New York City from Mondrian. I love it: squirming through pipes, looking back at myself, finding a letter in a seemingly impossible place.
Like all challenges, this will get more and more complicated as the game progresses. They’re all evolving, just like the way an artist’s work evolves. Opportunities arise and are exploited. Analogies and explanations show themselves.But here, you’re not just looking at the finished work, you’re part of that exciting, unpredictable part process, so you can also get opportunities, analogies, and explanations. You can sit closer to the artist while they are thinking.
I think the issue of placement is key here. Part of the problem with art is that you often see it in the same place—perhaps in the wrong place. The gallery, yes, the church-like silence and creaking floor encourages a certain kind of viewing. And, people like Kandinsky: thrown into the buzzing hallways of Marriott hotels to offset the carpet, or covering the walls of a dozen media departments in universities across the country, and most countries. It is difficult to understand Kandinsky in a place like this.
But it’s only in stages, I try to tell myself. This is not art. As I often find it difficult to distinguish things, it’s possible. One of my favorite pictures in the world is Las Meninas by Velazquez, a favorite painting that hangs in the favorite room of the Prado, Madrid’s favorite museum. (A favorite city.) Ideal, I guess. But in this photo, Las Meninas is elsewhere. It is wartime and the painting has been taken out of the gallery and kept away from the city for safekeeping. It is outdoors, surrounded by people responsible for its protection. In this dangerous example, in this historical contingency, what you see is the fusion of the real and the painted, and this painting that captures a moment is also poised to spill that moment into the world today. This is its gift. Well, it’s one of the gifts.
Sorry to talk about Velázquez again (he’s the only meaningful painter I really know), but that’s the power of please touch the artwork. It lets you ignore galleries, it lets you go through frames. Here’s a hint on how to get involved with abstract works, and essentially there are a few hurdles before you get the hang of them.
I am afraid to write this review because I think I have to pay tribute to Mondrian, one of those artists who has such a firm idea of what his work means and what it should be seen as. I guess I have to learn these arguments and then spit them out to understand the game I just played – making Mondrian’s arguments my own despite the fact that they never inspired anything in me.inability to feel completely get it.
However, halfway through the game, I realized I didn’t have to do that. I walked through the gallery, through the frame, and recalled how many times I had seen Mondrian in person and got up close. Like almost everyone who comes close to me, I find MS Paint’s cleanliness – Euclidean sharpness of lines, Fill tool Color blanks – that’s all a mirage. Approach, the line stops before the edge of the canvas, and the black crawls out of the border. The red, blue and yellow squares show individual brushstrokes – in fact, they are surprisingly textured.
Looking through it, many people have had moments like this, and were almost struck by the reality of Mondrian’s material, material, and how it was used. So what, then: the paintings themselves are nothing more than human approximations of something ideal, purely abstract, that Mondrian was still pursuing? Or go deeper? Is the conflict of roughness, clarity and compromise the way he has always been? I don’t know, but it’s definitely something to consider. That’s it: this game plays drawing, but it also gives me a full painter back. It rescued him from the list of artists that made me feel a little bleak. I’m very grateful.
