Translucent tape art of Max Zorn
January 4, 2012 10:45 AM   Subscribe

Max Zorn makes translucent art with a scalpel and brown packing tape (though he has worked with blue and a bit of green). A self-taught "classical" painter, he turned to back-lit street art in May 2011, and now has a growing gallery of works that are inspired by American Realism/film noir.
posted by filthy light thief (17 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
Sadly (from my perspective anyway) not this Max Zorn.
posted by hoyland at 10:54 AM on January 4, 2012


eponysterical.
posted by crunchland at 10:54 AM on January 4, 2012 [2 favorites]


Am I right in seeing that he does all that freehand? Wow.
posted by rtha at 11:03 AM on January 4, 2012


hoyland, I was going to add a disclaimer of the sort, but didn't. With that, here's another bio page on German-born mathematician Max Zorn.

rtha - according to this interview (linked above as self-taught "classical" painter), he often uses photos or scenes from movies as inspiration, and the actual pieces start with a rough sketch on acrylic glass. But the cuts look to be free-hand. Somewhere, I thought I read that he got the inspiration to work with tape from seeing friends work on custom paint jobs on cars, taping out their designs, quickly creating the templates for pieces.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:15 AM on January 4, 2012


man that was really cool!
posted by rebent at 11:47 AM on January 4, 2012


Max, please, please come to Toronto, we have new canvases laid out for you!
posted by anthill at 11:57 AM on January 4, 2012


Also not to be confused with a certain Bond villain.

In any case, it's nice to see somebody really doing street art in a tactile sense, with nothing but their own two hands and some simple tools, as opposed to just wheatpasting a bunch of posters that they made in Photoshop.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:58 AM on January 4, 2012


So we're going to completely forget about his murderous past, then, and his attempts to physically destroy America's high tech economic engine and plunge our nation, indeed our world, into economic chaos?

We're just going to ignore all that because now he makes interesting art? Really?

You tell me, Metafilter. Is this the face of a man with the soul or an artist, or a sociopathic killer?
posted by Naberius at 12:01 PM on January 4, 2012


Damn it, Strange Interlude!
posted by Naberius at 12:01 PM on January 4, 2012 [2 favorites]


OK, to clear up any confusion, I've added the NotThatMaxZorn tag.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:10 PM on January 4, 2012




This was a lot neater than I expected. I wish he did his own compositions, since some of the "inspired" ones seem too close to the originals.
posted by cjorgensen at 12:12 PM on January 4, 2012


"In any case, it's nice to see somebody really doing street art in a tactile sense, with nothing but their own two hands and some simple tools, as opposed to just wheatpasting a bunch of posters that they made in Photoshop."
Except these are obviously traced systematically from photos that have been posterized or had a cut-out filter applied to them- so the same process as the cliched screen print wheat pastes you see everyone and their sister doing. Still, I do like the choice of materials and the stained glass effect of the packing tape.
posted by stagewhisper at 12:22 PM on January 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


Here is another artist who works in tape.
Mark Khaisman
posted by quazichimp at 12:41 PM on January 4, 2012 [2 favorites]


Why put this up on streetlamps? Aren't there other lighted surfaces that would suffice? We need the illumination from street lamps (already too dim) to help keep streets safe. Now, copycats are going to go up poles and cover street lights with their "art", and make them even more dim. Lame. I just don't get that some people who call themselves artists think it is their constitutionally-given right to impose their creativity on everyone else, including vandalizing public property.
posted by Vibrissae at 4:26 PM on January 4, 2012


Is "back-lit street-art" the same as graffiti with a lamp behind it?
posted by ReeMonster at 9:09 PM on January 4, 2012


Most graffiti isn't little film noir-inspired portraits. If it was, people might not mind so much. Then again, I'm fond of artistic graffiti, not the hasty scrawls that only say "I was here".

stagewhisper: Except these are obviously traced systematically from photos that have been posterized or had a cut-out filter applied to them

Did you see the first video? Unless the template is washed out, it looks like he does it freehand, no tracing involved.

And I don't imagine there'd be a huge rush of copycats in this field of urban art/defacement. It's easier to steal address labels from the post office and doodle on those than create tape art, shimmy up a light pole, and tape your work up.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:41 AM on January 5, 2012


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