Installations2018shown

THE WAX PLINTH

Wax and paper tiles laid across a black plinth. The 2018 degree work, seen here for the first time.

A low black square plinth photographed on white, its top surface tiled edge to edge with overlapping cream and violet wax-and-paper squares marked with black shapes.
A low black plinth, roughly square, its top covered edge to edge with small tiles of wax and paper. Each tile is a sheet sealed under wax — cream, slightly translucent, with black held inside it. Some lie flat, some have curled at the corner. Two crumpled lumps of wax sit among them like stones. The wax does two things at once. It seals the sheet, so the mark can go no further. And it lets the black spread sideways under the surface, so edges bloom and soften instead of ending. You look down at this work rather than across at it. Made for the degree exhibition at UAD Cluj-Napoca in 2018, in the same room as the folded books. It has not been in the archive until now. Three frames of the finished plinth survive. Everything else is the studio: the same tiles laid out on the worktable, moved around and re-read before they were fixed.
Medium
Wax and paper tiles on a black-painted plinth
Materials
wax, paper, black ink, black-painted wooden plinth
Role
Artist

Gallery

Close view across the tiled top of the plinth, cream wax tiles with black marks receding into shallow focus, two pale crumpled wax lumps among them.
Across the surface. The lumps are wax, crumpled and left.
Overhead view of dozens of amber-lit wax tiles arranged on a dark worktable, black bars and blots inside each tile.
The tiles laid out on the worktable, before they were fixed.
Low-angle black and white view along a table of pale wax tiles casting shadows, a crumpled ball of wax at the centre.
Low angle. The tiles read as objects, not pages.
Black and white overhead of the whole arrangement of wax tiles spread across a dark table, a folded dark sheet angled at the centre.
The whole arrangement, seen from above.
Overhead view of a sparser arrangement of amber wax tiles on a dark ground, each holding black grid-like marks.
A sparser pass at the same set.
Wax tiles arranged on a dark cloth-covered table in a studio, edges of the room visible at the left.
The studio. Nothing staged.
Close view of coarse translucent granules and yellow paste in a green plastic bucket with a wooden stirring stick.
The raw material in the bucket, before melting.

Related work

CAUSTIC
CAUSTIC
Exhibitions · 2018
EXPERIMENTAL BOOKS
EXPERIMENTAL BOOKS
Objects · 2018
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THE WAX PLINTH — Installations · Ovidiu Bojor — Work & Design Archive