With this sculpture, Nick Ervinck explores the dialogue between virtual designs (blob) and the conventional models of architecture (box). This contrast between organic and rigid forms, between virtual and physical, pervades the work of Nick Ervinck. While most architects favor only one single of these schools in design, Ervinck choose with this design resolutely for a third way: the synthesis of both. Inspired by architects like Will Alsop and Greg Lynn, Ervinck explored the potential of digital design methods for the art of sculpture. With REWOTFIU, Ervinck designed an organic form that seems to loosen the tower structure, but at the same time cannot exist without the latter. In this work, the blob and the box are two identities that attack, embrace and reject each other and merge together.
When architecture and sculpting meet, sculptures inside sculptures come about that proceed manual sculpting. REWOTFIU is a good example of this evolution. Inspired by the aesthetics of so-called blob architecture, as well as by the oriental and occidental tradition and the Chinese rock gardens, Nick Ervinck constructed a contemporary, digitalized rock sculpture that incorporates the architectural volume as a parasitic creature. The newest 3D printing techniques allow these complex structures to enter into reality itself. It is exactly this mutual fertilization between the digital and the actual that Ervinck is interested in.
Using the newest techniques of 3D printing, he is able to translate these forms into the physical world. The inside of the sculpture has for instance also been sculpturally designed which is technically or manually impossible. This ‘sculpture within a sculpture’ radically changes the art of sculpture. Where Michelangelo still dealt with chopping away, chiselling or carving, the digital design process follows an opposite route: the virtual form is not ‘freed’ from matter, but becomes a productive or generative principle in itself. It is needless to say that these developments hold great significance for the art of sculpting, drawing and painting. Instead of being restricted to the two dimensional surface, the artist now can work in different dimensions in order to create what hardly can be thought of.