Panel Blocks

The prefab panel block is the country's most common architecture, and it has a pedigree. Its great-grandfather is the constructivism of the 1920s: the communal house, the ribbon window, the facade as a drawing. Its great-great-grandfather is the avant-garde: Malevich, for whom the square and the stripe became the subject. The panel block is what remained of that utopia once it was put on the assembly line: module, seam, window, balcony, repeated a thousand times.

The series looks at that facade as ornament rather than as daily life. Windows and balconies are built in modules, like a Suprematist composition. The vertical stripes of the city are a rhythm that holds the wall. Blue glass blocks — a facade translated into colour. A grid of windows on gold — a panel block with the melancholy taken out and only the structure left. An urban series without nostalgia: constructivism recognises itself in it.

Relief on artboard, the modules modelled and set on a grid; paint, leaf gold on the windows like evening light in the glass; epoxy resin over it. The edition is numbered.

A series for a loft, an office, an architect's studio, an apartment in that very building. A panel block on the wall is an admission that this architecture is architecture too.