Italian artist Edoardo Tresoldi has realized a scenographic space as a backdrop for a royal event in Abu Dhabi in collaboration with Dubai-based studio Designlab Experience. The event, which was attended by 1,900 guests from the whole Middle East, required a three-month work of planning and development. The 7,000 square meters scenographic space marks a step forward for the Italian artist, who for the first time confronts himself with the design of a vast indoor space, together with Designlab Experience’s Mootassem Elbaba and Marwan Maalouf. Part of the artworks will be re-installed separately in institutional locations: universities, museums and parks across the UAE capital.
Edoardo Tresoldi and Designlab Experience envisioned a garden where architecture and nature dance together in continuous connections and contrasts, whose peculiarities, in the Renaissance meaning, are filtered, absorbed and interpreted by the contemporary man. The set-up is a symphonic space where classical archetypes interact with the signs of the modernist language. Using transparencies and their broken rhythms, Tresoldi cuts and breaks up classical harmonies with elements of absolute geometry such as spheres, cubes, and planes. The overall effect results in a continuous evolution of architectural abstractions and evanescent distortions.
An absolute landscape that develops itself through an inverse process: nature grows and evolves on the imaginary space, trying to give shape and matter to human visions. In Tresoldi’s concept, the transparent architecture determines the interpretation of natural orders, with small visual poems in which these two worlds prove to be parallel and intersected at the same time. Nature is a synthesis of landscape, man becomes landscape through architecture. If, to quote Hölderlin, gardens are what allow us to “dwell poetically upon this earth”, Edoardo Tresoldi’s work in Abu Dhabi is then a multi-tiered experience, a sacralized and identified human space. The fusion of classical and modernist language generates a third one, marked by clear visual and volumetric decompositions, a contemporary one.
all images © Roberto Conte