Photo > Art > Design: reality under a new perspective
Xavier Goodman was born and raised in Milan, where he still lives. He has worked as an advertiser, producer, director, actor and visual artist. As an artist, after various experiences with different media, he chose digital art as his medium. He’s always been a passionate photographer and decided to combine his passion with the digital world. The encounter results in a creative path that is giving him great emotions and that he decided to share. Here is how he creates his artworks.
Photo > Everything starts from a photograph that he personally takes. The subject is not important. What he looks for is a color palette and certain shapes and lines.
> Art > Then he transforms the photograph through digital processing programs. The result is an abstract pictorial image, where nothing recalls the original. So, his starting point is reality but the result is a different perception of it.
> Design: a further step in the artistic process is the creation of design items such as tables, wallpapers, fabrics and more.The completion of the path, where art meets function, inspired by the “Arts and Crafts” movement created by John Ruskin and William Morris in the mid-19th century.
The media used are UV direct prints on Dibond® aluminium or Plexiglass. This printing technique and this type of media give great physical presence. The artworks are hung spaced 2 cm away from the wall with a floating mount. They are conceived for the extra-large format, a dimension in which they express all their strength and beauty.
Here’s what a famous art critic said about Xavier Goodman’s work:
“What’s the meaning of the word “photography” today, in its etymological definition of “writing with light”, with respect to the advent of digital, which allows you to create images from scratch? The same question arises in front of the works of Xavier Goodman. What seems to be arbitrary color lines created on the computer, are instead real photographs, taken by himself, manipulated and distorted to create abstract paintings. The artist then prints this “distortions of the real” directly on large aluminum boards, which can be hang on a wall or become design tables of his own creation or can turn into patterns for wallpapers, fabrics, carpets. Xavier Goodman develops an aesthetic / creative concept that arises in that sort of boundary between “Arts and Crafts”, in the highest sense of the word; the artistic movement of the mid-19th century to the reform of the applied arts. We could coin, with a play on words, the neologism “object oriented photography” in the sense that starting from a true photograph, the artist transforms it into a possible object: whether an aluminum panel to hang on a wall or a table or a fabric or whatever his imagination is able to shape. Xavier Goodman stimulates, with its visions, an endless series of references and citations in the viewer. The unconscious thus begins to wander in front of his color tangles, making many references to figurative art resurface. From cave paintings, to Paolo Uccello; from Vermeer’s interiors, to the world of Klimt. An actual photograph, only hidden to the eye but not to the unconscious, with which Xavier Goodman ultimately returns that apparently lost meaning of “photo-graphy”, which is “writing with light”.
Claude Brassai – 2017