Hasta La Ideas

Artist Tofer Chin’s black stalagmite sculptures invade a Rio de Janeiro park

The 30 mosquito bites that eventually landed him in the hospital from a Dengue scare didn’t stop artist Tofer Chin from installing his latest show in Rio de Janeiro’s Parque Lage. “Fourteen Black,” as the Los Angeles native calls it, runs until 30 April 2011 as part of Rojo’s Nova project.

To address the project’s theme about the absence of light, Chin placed 14 tall, black triangles—a shape that regularly appears in his work—around the Patos Lagoon in the park, located in the Jardim Botanico neighborhood. The wooden, acrylic-coated “black stalagmites,” as he calls them, are meant to be “living and breathing souls, ghosts, spirits, voids, shadows.”

In contrast to the abundant, bright, green surroundings, they work to emphasize the existence of dark, shady areas in the park and play on the idea of light versus absorption of light. Also, because of the way that light bounces off the sides of the angular sculptures, they give the scene a surreal digital touch.

You can get a behind-the-scenes look of the artist installing his work as well as other artists participating in the Nova project here .

The pet project of paint company Dulux, Let’s Colour is an international outreach project in which volunteers travel to drab and dreary corners of the world and enliven them with a fresh coat of paint. “Color your world” is the tagline for the program that hopes to transform communities by the brushstroke.

This year the Let’s Colour crew has travelled to London, Rio de Janeiro, Paris and Jodhpur to find and help neighborhoods paint themselves anew. They hope to expand to other countries, including Turkey, throughout the year.

In an interview with CH, Fernanda Romano—Global Creative Director of Marketing at Euro RSCG—talked about Let’s Colour. Says Romano, the idea behind it was: “let’s find locations, places around the world, they’re a bit dull, a bit grey. Let’s engage the local community.” She adds, encouraging community involvement was crucial to succeed: “Mandating things to people feels a bit old fashioned. People want to collaborate, people create content to share with the world.”

The project turned into something more than a P.R. campaign for Romano and her team. “We really wanted to get people excited about painting and color. We really wanted to get people excited about the effect color has on you. it was about a spiritual, emotional regeneration.”

When Dulux, a subsidiary of AkzoNobel, approached Romano, they brought a video of employees painting houses in Brazil that had sparked the original concept. The company approached countries where the company has a big presence about participating in the project and found enthusiasm from the local communities.

Romano found the response hopeful: “It was quite touching to see how much the community appreciated what was happening and how much they saw the benefit.”

The Let’s Colour blog documents all the locales, as well as their color choices and inspiration in each neighborhood. The project also has filmmaker Adam Berg filming the entire process. The individual video for the four places is online, and Berg has plans to release a full video of the project in the next month.

Says Fernanda, “by showing it and being it rather than telling people to do it, it’s a truer way to invite people to bring color into their own home.”