THE COLLECTION
Bending the Lines and Pixelated Forms
If meditation is the practice by which humans humbly dedicate themselves to aligning body and mind, material and immaterial, then Gil Bruvel’s “Bending the Line'' series is the artistic translation of that practice. With skillful craft these forms mirror the time, tempering, and fluctuation involved in any tool of repetition, whether working with sculpture, body, or the mind. Fragments retain individuality, and yet cohere into articulate, changing forms, abstract yet specific, reflecting states of consciousness and the observation of thought. We are one, we are many, and we are whole. In meditation, as in Bruvel’s sculptures, we see the light and dark of our experience reflected in natural forms, eliminating boundaries to universal understanding and compassion.
Bruvel’s “Pixelated Forms” show us universal faces in a dream-like way, through color and texture, evoking references to nature, visioning, the cosmos, and the breath. Archetypal aspects of identity and human moments shed light on our deepest mysteries, the ones within and behind the mask. In traditional Bruvel fashion, each piece is painstakingly built. Firstly, from wood, nature is transformed by human hand as the artist layers profiles. Next pieces are formed sculpturally and subjected to fire, which has the effect of accentuating the wood’s veins. Residue of the ritual alchemy is scarred into both subject and object.
These forms are built and controlled, but also released to the chaos of fire, once again, returning aesthetics to the hands of nature. What might be emerging into poetic awareness in the mind of the meditator, is also drawn back into beautiful abstraction. We cannot hold on to moments of presence. The back of each piece resembles nerve synapses firing, or the depth of space and stars, areas of protrusion and recession, the tension of push and pull that creates all life.
Within his “Bending the Line'' series, Bruvel also applies these metaphors to the wall, using the tradition of the rectangular frame to isolate energies, movements, textures, and color-plays that mimic nature and an enhanced sense of aliveness. Miniature cubes and rectangles lay like woven threads forming a tapestry that might be a portal to another realm. These pieces celebrate the delicate and ordinary existence around us. Through their interlocking forms, Bruvel’s sculptures provide not just a depiction, but the sensation of life.
Influenced by cymatics, architecture, fractals, science and design, Gil has developed a style that filters the practical knowledge of fluid dynamics and organic processes into groundbreaking works of art.
This brand new trio of art objects will be available only as a limited edition and suitable for both fine art and design exhibition. Consisting of two chairs and a triangular stool, the breathtaking designs that compose Flow Series: Functional Art are cast in stainless steel. Utile as well as aesthetically stunning, the Dichotomy Chair draws its dissecting currents of lines from waveforms, with the movement of each embracing horizontal and vertical plateaus. The base emerges as if organically rooted to the floor and balanced as if grounded in nature itself. The Zig Zag Impulse Chair, salutes contemporary architecture and stands frozen, as if woven from living metallic fabric. Like fluid dynamics, the energy in these designs by Gil Bruvel capture the movement of liquids and lines and the oscillations we find in natural formations. His Equilateral Apex Stool stands as a sensual monument to form and function. The geometrics of this small table call to mind mineral and crystal shapes, or petrified wood. In stainless steel, this trio of new pieces by Gil Bruvel converges into an alchemical set of fine art design that brings this artist’s poetic abstractions into the realm of practical ingenuity.
In the Cubist Series, Bruvel explores the connection between various patterns and human facial expressions. Made with separate pieces that converge into a whole, these complex structures take on a life of their own. Defined lines gradually roll into sharp curves, blending soft features with an abstract contour. As the face is composed, fractured architectural landscapes begin to emerge as forms combine. The parts are represented in a variety of organic and geometric forms unique to each artwork.
Sinuous waves of cast steel coalesce and transform, shedding light on the human condition and its capacity for multiplicity and change. In Gil Bruvel’s ongoing “Flow Series”, ribbons of metal remind us of natural textures and reliefs, referencing stone, earth, wind, and water, all pliable and natural evolutions of form. Organic movement extends from recognizable images to dream-like metaphors, drawing viewers into a unique sense of beauty and the unexpected, the ephemeral and the eternal now.
True of all the work in this series, reflective surfaces provide a natural mirror crossed by flows of energy drawn through bands of steel. Presented as static moments, each sculpture offers a poetic statement and focal point to consider cohesive, yet contradictory, aspects of self. Dichotomies, labyrinths, and other multi-directional flows create a tension of the opposites, which in a felt-sense people contain regularly. This can be seen in figural works like “Flowing”, “Dichotomy”, “My Mirror’s Remains”, and “Never Ending”, each sculpture revealing new patterns of divergence.
Throughout his long-standing career, Bruvel’s work references meditation, a lens with which we might recognize aspirational selves in figures like “Rain” from the “Flow Series”. The goal of meditation is to expand our capacity to experience moments of full presence, here illustrated in a figure as they catch the falling rain. Fusing rings of a tree with an above-and-below water reflection, in “Rain” the artist clearly evokes duality, presence, and balance. This could also be said of his series of meditating faces created with burn-sticks, emphasizing color, gradient, and the self-made of parts. These sculptures awaken a deep vision of the potential ecstasy of life…cyclical, ephemeral, pure, and complete.
“Flow Series” figures such as “The River” and “The Wind” combine these aspects with further allusion to the forces of nature. Continuing with water as a representation of emotion, interconnection, and shifting potential, “The River” suggests a source and a destination, as well as an ability to repattern ourselves. “The Wind” balances grounding across the shoulder plexus with a quickness and unrestricted movement carrying off in wisps. We perceive the openness of the figure’s senses, and the ease and pleasure that comes from inhabiting the moment, encouraging us to find that openness in ourselves.
“Flow Series” also features the monolith “Descent”, a 3,000-pound marine-grade surgical steel skull made with only five originals. Number two of that set is housed poolside in a high-concept private home, showing that Bruvel’s approach rests inherently well alongside the human need for beauty and reflection. In all, the series strikes a thoughtful and inviting balance of deeply researched and highly crafted technical forms with accessible invitations into deeper meaning. The series evokes the flow of emotion and sensation, of life force energy that holds us together and pulls us apart, allowing us to think and act in new directions.
The art of war and strategy is the essence of the game of chess. Bruvel's goal by designing a thematic chess set was to increase the sense of opposition between the two sides. As the design progressed, he also experienced a sense of fusion and complementarity between the two sides.
Figurative Side : The world is perceived and expressed with recognizable elements we can reference to perceived reality, the representational world.
Abstract Side : The world as we conceptualize it with arbitrary elements that are ways of expressing how we value the contexts in which we understand it, the abstract world. Some elements may still be recognizable but they are just there to suggest and let the viewer form their own conclusions.
Scent Series - Original Paintings
The Color of Scent—Sensual Fusion in Celebration of the Feminine
In the timeless presence of a beautiful woman, the senses are enveloped in a fluid, indefinable wave of experience, delicate yet intense. You can feel the visceral caress of her voice. You can hear the musical emanation of her form. In a dance of color, you see the enticing fragrance that swirls around her, yet cannot be named.
This sensory overlap is known as synesthesia, where one sense perception is simultaneously experienced through an unrelated sense. Perceptual boundaries dissolve. Sounds, smells, colors, and shapes are mutable and intertwined; distinctions disappear. In Gil Bruvel’s new series of paintings, dancing radiant hues are the artist’s visual expression of an alluring, ephemeral, and often mysterious feminine scent.
Yet just as our sense experiences are reshaped, the door is also thrown open to a vastly expanded conception of female beauty-and woman’s own sense of herself, her unexplored potential, her place in the world. The essence of the feminine remains, but uncontained by templates from the past. In Bruvel’s compelling vision, universal feminine beauty is perceived through a new set of senses: vibrant female energy expressed as richly colored flames and undulating waves. They eddy delicately through and around her or vibrate powerfully from her core. A magical fusion of fragrance and color symbolizes and celebrates woman’s emerging identity in an enveloping, ever-changing flow.
The Journey Series - Original Paintings
"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware." - Martin Buber
Balanced on the scale of time, we are infinitesimal, an ephemeral breath of wind, now here, now gone. We walk on the earth with creatures whose ancestors trod the same ground long before we were here. And they, in turn, move through trees whose seeds for eons have fallen and sprouted and grown in soil and rock whose geologic memory is unfathomably deep-the agelessness of the earth itself. On another scale, we totter precariously; we are too large. Yet the weights that cause us to tip-our clever inventiveness, narrow vision, unchecked desires-may somehow find balance in other equally human traits: curiosity, wonder, cooperation, and awe.