Reviving Classic Masterpieces Via 3D Scanning

Envy / Purity, Pakistani Onyx / Mexican Onyx

The Museum of Arts and Design in New York is hosting its Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital exhibition for an uncommonly long stretch of time, but the breadth of its content couldn’t be showcased across any shorter length. From mid-October 2013 to June of this year, the 8-month series explores works by more than 80 international artists, whose endeavors captivate just how powerfully tech-mediums are pushing the stream of global contemporary art into new creative channels.

In many ways, it’s a State of the Union address for the 21st-century art world. But some of its featured artists, like sculptor and designer Barry X Ball, are demonstrating modernity by reprising the past. Using tools of now to evidence how far the artistic process has evolved, Ball’s sculptures represent the endless pursuit of perfection, and how many of art’s antecedents were arguably limited in this pursuit by their mediums.

A portrait of the artist, Lucas Michael […], Lapis Lazuli aggregate.

A portrait of […] Laura Mattioli Rossi […], Lapis Lazuli Aggregate.

But by exploring his artistic statements, interviews and the videos documenting his process, you come to understand why Ball isn’t just throwing up new representations of designated classics in his Masterpieces series. In other words: these aren’t copies. There’s the obvious difference, like the fact that he utilizes a fanning cross-section of rare (and incredibly beautiful and cool-sounding) mediums like Pakistani Onyx where his sculpting predecessors would have used the ubiquitous Carrara marble or bronze.

Then there’s the more fascinating separation: that Ball recognized these previous masterpieces as incomplete, and decided to take on the almost metaphysical task of producing them the way their progenitors could have only dreamed of. The fantastical ideals of bygone masters, which only ever neared a pure state in sketch-books and small-scale models, are now being revived in perfect physical form.

Purity, Pink Iranian Onyx.

To create his interpretations of Giusto Le Court’s “Envy” (La Invidia) and Antonio Corradini’s “Purity” (La Purita), Ball and his crew took 3D scans of the original busts and used this data as a foundation for each subsequent cast. Each series took about 3 years to make, requiring hundreds of hours of design and hand work.

Envy, Mexican Onyx.

Purity, Belgian Black Marble.

Ball created 4 of both figures, with each hewn in a series of exotic stones and minerals.

Envy, Golden Honeycomb Calcite.

In Sleeping Hermaphrodite, Ball’s use of Belgian Black Marble and stainless steel imbue an almost alien weight and life in the subject’s body, giving her a reflectiveness and purity of contour that couldn’t have been achieved when an iteration of this Grecian original was created by Romans in 2nd century A.D.

Sleeping Hermaphrodite, Belgian Black Marble on Carrara Marble / Stainless Steel.

Sleeping Hermaphrodite.

His most recent piece, Perfect Forms, definitely feels like the culmination of his Masterpiece efforts. Based on Italian painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni’s bronze figure Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (maybe you recognize it from being on the 20 cent Italian Euro), Ball’s Perfect Forms consists of a copper, nickel and stainless steel base, all coated with over with 24 karat gold. It’s hard to look away from.

Perfect Forms.

Perfect Forms in display case.

Maybe achieving “perfection” in art seems so impossible because artists rarely come out and recognize it as a possibility. But even if “perfection” is completely relative in the end, what is impossible is not becoming entirely engrossed in Ball’s 3D-scanned sculptures - whether or not you think he hit the mark. The hours he and his crew have devoted to crafting and fine-tuning becomes obvious when you compare their creations with the models they’re reprising. But in lieu of the classic format of questions about the future, it makes you wonder: who’ll be reprising these reprisals four hundred years down the line?What will the pursuit of perfection look like then?

Watch a video of Ball talking about his work at the Out of Hand exhibition below:

All images courtesy of Barry X Ball.