Diagonal Work 2

Diagonal Work 2 examines the problem of the diagonal as a translation of certain painterly forms and ideas – those relayed through or rendered in the diamond-shaped canvases of Piet Mondrian – into plastic devices and composition strategies. The work endeavours to mimic and give plastic form and shape to specific effects discerned in the diamond canvases of Mondrian. Put differently, the work undertakes an analysis of the processes and effects rendered when translating neo-plasticist painterly space into three-dimensional works. Four interconnected themes demarcate the larger research: peripheral tensions, boundless field extensions, voided centres, and spatial warps realised from right angle relationships.
Diagonal Work 2 contributes to debates around the relationships of painting (two dimensional space) and three-dimensional works (sculpture and architecture), adds to critical histories of modernist space and composition at this moment in its trajectory, and makes a modest contribution to scholarship on the potential of Piet Mondrian for practice and thinking today in the practices and theories of architecture generally and the plastic arts of painting and sculpture specifically. In Diagonal Work 2’s emphasis on the theme of spatial warps, it enables and leads to the generation of a third idea of space alongside renaissance or perspectival space and cubist space. In this way, the work is concerned with a double translation, that of certain of Piet Mondrian's painterly devices into the realm of plastic three-dimensional work, and the potential translation or transmutation of ideas of space that results from a confrontation with and mutual imbrication in neo-plasticism