More recently this has been joined by the desire to express something of the schizophrenic quality' of present western urban life.
...he was attracted to work that was intricate and 'busy' like the drawings of durer, rembrandt, Piero di Cosimo's paintings, Byzantine and Gothic ivories, and the surfaces of orinetal bronzes. Insuch works he found 'other ways of handling my own obsession with detail... For mem as for Piero di Cosimo, detail is...a world within a world, and then another world within this last world, like a series of boxes in which each box once opened, reveals in turn another box, and then again another box' (roditi, Dialogues in art).
From the beginning, he scanned the world around him for stimuli to be transformed into segments of his finished work. Many early drawings and sculptures were based on childhood days near the sea shore. Already he tried, as he later said. 'to achieve a metamorphosis of quite ordinary thingd into something wonderful and extraordinary that is neither nonsensical nor morally edifying.' (roditi) Animals, gas lamps and fishermen were turned into magical linearschemata or reduced anatomies of arbitary structural planes.
These dawings were the first strong statement's of paolozzi's extraordinary ability to find a living spirit in any chosen subject- animate or inanimate..
H-50's work was about expanding the field of vision, artist's were interested by the devlopment of photographies and technologies to enable humans to see what was once before invisible to the naked eye. This was explored in a group show 'Parallel of life and art' at the ICA.
During the first part of the 1950's, Paolozzi devised collage techniques to create a series of presences which embodied the spirit of various total systems. As visual metaphors for a variety of natural and man-made 'communications networks' they reflected the interest which was developing in many places at this time in the informal image systems of various macro- and micro- structures.
Statement of purpose for show-
'Technical inventions such as photographic enlarger, aerial photography and the high speed flash have given us new tools with wihcih to expand our field of vision beyond the limits imposed on our previous generations. Their products feed our newspapers, our periodicals and our films, being continually before our eyes; thus we have become familiar with material and aspects of material hitherto inaccessible. Today the painter, for example, may find benath the microscope a visual world of streets, trees, and faces. But the work will necessarily seem obscure to the observer who does not take into account the impact on him of these new visual discoveries. (unpublished manuscript of nigel henderson)
The images have the intricacy and equally-overall patterns of maps, charts, diagrams, plans; yet they also possess that particular sense of vital eclan- of living presence- which informs most of paolozzi's personal works.
The project never got off the ground but the project proposed an imaginative and elaborate child environment in which the surface of a rectanglular play field was broken by wandering line and dot divisions reminiscient of city lots and streets.
Paolozzi developed his environment concept further ina maquette for unknown political prisoner international sculpture competition sponsored by the ica in 1952. The model has five moveable 'buildings' resting on a thick slab base. Seven areas on the base are violently cross scored, creating rough sites for the 5 structures. Other line patterns on the base suggest a city map, although the placement is too irregular, too casual, too unsystematic for any existent city scheme.
Paolozzi's was differnt. He createc a group of closed architectonic forms, each a different simple shape, set on a base which unified them into elements of a single work. The space that flowed around and between them reinforced their abstract shapes presence.
collages... they seeme like fantastica architectural plans, or aerial views of earth and city surfaces....For paolozzi serendipity was one key to releasing/creating his hermetic world of images.
None of the collages can be grasped as a visual whole. The eye must wander over the surface exploring the never static colours, patterns, shapes, relationships which seemingly unfold before the viewer's gaze. The images captures some of the rich, shifting, disordered quality of the modern life experience.