Quayola: the artist disappearing into three dimensions

Huge, pixellated sculptures of anthropomorphic forms in Carrara marble, not hewn by human hand but by algorithms and CNC robots, form the latest iteration of work from the Italian artist Quayola.

His imposing sculptures reflect two decades of investigation into human perception, and how new technology informs and modifies it.

For Quayola, it is also an evolution from two dimensions to three – spurred on by ideas that have obsessed the Rome-based artist since he graduated in digital media from London’s University of the Arts in 2005.

His earlier video work looked at rereading classical traditions in art or observances of nature, both through a filter of point cloud datasets and digital augmentation, creating films of strange intensity. Even these works have an architectonic quality, which his later sculptural work only confirms.

Fascinations with Michelangelo

This is no coincidence. Quayola, 40 this year, was 11 when his elder brother began studying architecture, which saw him develop an early obsession with CAD software.

By the time Quayola started his own studies in London, in 2002, he had, via filial osmosis, been exposed to Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction.

‘My mind was shaped in part by the early computational experiments of Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenmann and Co-op Himmelblau,’ he tells me. ‘But I wasn’t understanding them as architectural ideas but sculptural forms – more interested in the software’s possibilities than the buildings.’

Quayola was at the time living with his best friend, who was a student at the AA. After graduating himself, his art-based digital output was of sufficient note to see him sitting in crits at the AADRL, its abstraction clearly suiting someone more interested in process than product.

Michelangelo’s Prigioni, or Captives, sculptures, executed between 1513 and 1530, are of enduring fascination for Quayola and are a subject of his recent work.

Stunningly unfinished, with human forms that seem to wrestle their way out of raw stone, Quayola feels ‘the Prigioni are essentially the apotheosis of an object that manifests the story of its own creation – less about the figures than the articulation of matter itself’. 

For someone whose own work is a dive into process, representation and abstraction, past and future, this was a territory ripe for his study, Unfinished Sculptures.

CNC 3D milling robots ‘bastardised'

Quayola initially explored taking the sculptures and digitally scanning and modifying them virtually using his own bespoke-developed software. But it was work done concurrently, with a growing curiosity, with 3D milling processes and the robots that generate them – one of which he ended up buying.

A series of themed works followed, carved in super-light materials such as foam. But it soon occurred to Quayola that his aim ‘was never about remaking classics using robots, but finding a new aesthetic and expression that using them might generate’.

It marked a return to process. ‘When you look at the Michelangelo sculptures, their expressiveness is on account of the stone that bears the mark of a chisel and human action,' Quayola says. ‘I didn’t want the robots to produce something you might just craft digitally; I wanted them to somehow leave their own marks and generate a similar expressiveness.’

Achieving that meant working directly with high-end CNC-milling stone fabricator TorArt Robotor, located at the famous quarry at Carrara in Italy. Accustomed more to working for such artists as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, for whom its costly CAM software was designed to reproduce their work ‘perfectly’, it took a while to gain Robotor operatives’ trust and allow Quayola to ‘bastardise' the technology.

‘I guess they decided it was a way for them to showcase that you can do crazy things with CNC robots rather than just the standard or accepted,’ Quayola says. ‘They were intrigued by the ideas and could afford to let me play with the coding; to challenge its software and robots to manifest their own random imperfections.’

Quayola’s experiments involved taking the full point cloud scanned figure into the CNC software in order to then manipulate it.

‘Any geometry that resulted was decided simply by where I told the robot to mill or not mill, alongside evidencing specific actions of how the robot cuts through the stone,’ he says. ‘It was an exercise in how to programme these gestures and overlap the actions to generate the effects.’

Escalating to 'super-natural' sculpture 

The robots, typically made by KUKA or ABB, and fitted with a milling spindle, might be the work end of the process. But the experience of TorArt or Madrid’s Factum Arte comes in knowing the type or size of chisel to use, explains Quayola.

‘Software simulates the movement of the spindle and chisel chipping away in layers,’ he says. ‘But the expertise lies in knowing how a particular stone resists or responds to the imposition.’

While Quayola is aware that the Bartlett experiments now with robots fitted with milling bits and using Rhino, he claims his technology is of next-level complexity.

‘They don’t have collision detection for a start,’ he says. ‘But working on large sculptures to tolerances of 0.1mm, it nonetheless requires human expertise to predict how the stone itself will respond.’

That humanity, Quayola hopes, is reflected in work that 'despite ephemeral computational processes, always has a physical output’; in effect, a meditation on the craft of stone working and human relationships with technology.

The resonance of the Carrara site is also not lost on him. ‘It is a documentation of an action – a site of geological age that is a negative space of all the culture generated in Italy over the last 2,000 years,’ he says.

His palimpsest-like Unfinished Works, he claims, sits within that same vein of history.

This April in Milan Quayola will present a new series, which seems to be attempting to create ‘super-natural' sculptures, intervening on huge lava stone boulders, sourced from the base of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius.

‘It’s a new technique where I scan the natural form and modify its geometry by milling specific areas, then tint the whole boulder so my intervention is almost imperceptible – much like a Chinese scholar’s rock,’ he says.

All this is a far cry from Michelangelo’s ego-driven genius; modern reflections on our new technological fabric – where, ironically, the artist just about disappears.