Dry for Brix
2008 — 2009
Standing out against a large wall of Brera BRIX is a huge cloud created with the D.R.Y. product by Vincent Van Duysen. A trefoil hexagonal module made of porcelain stoneware contains engravings inside it that in turn are asymmetrical.
This, combined with others randomly – since D.R.Y. stands for Don’t Repeat Yourself – gives rise to patterns and surfaces that are never identical. The uniqueness of this product lies precisely in the impossibility of obtaining any one surface that is the same as any other. A-schematic by its very nature, DRY has more in common with the logic of fractals that are self-generated randomly, almost as though eschewing the rules inherent in the classical laying of the ‘mosaic mechanism’, where we nevertheless appreciate the repetition determined by a regular sequence of pieces that make up the surface.
DRY is never identical to itself; it is a mutant, not a replicant. On each new surface it is as though the basic module loses its memory and reinvents a new expressive mode, combining vowels, consonants, syllables and words in an endless Babel of languages. One, none, a hundred thousand. One is the module, none is the possibility of repetition and a hundred thousand and more are the faces that a DRY surface can take on. Each DRY surface has no memory of previous lives. And every time it is reborn to a new life. A unique mode of composition that, needless to say, is about to be patented.
DRY is also a special project because it is created by moulding the tiles and not by cutting them, as happens for all other mosaics; so it lives in a single material. Dry can be combined with all BRIX materials and the range is not exhausted with the individual collection, but each new project, from a chromatic perspective, benefits from what has previously been produced so as to be harmonised with the existing one. A range project of ample scope where every innovation can be combined with the long-standing ones. Yet the colours are soft, from chalk white to mud.
The source of inspiration for Van Duysen is strong and attractive: the furrows of irregular cracks that mark the earth burnt by the Sun, but also the natural cracks that time engraves on old paintings. The ancestral language of organic forms strongly orients the culture in the project.
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